Yes, you read that right. I'm a 19-year-old girl, and I actually like who I am. How strange is that to hear?

I have never been the most confident person. I have struggled constantly with self-esteem for as long as I can remember. I have always thought that other people's opinions of me were somehow more important and that I should listen to them more than myself. However, recently I started looking at myself in a new light. I stopped seeing myself as the girl that wasn't skinny enough, pretty enough, smart enough, or nice enough and started to see myself as someone who is worthy. It took me a long time to finally stop seeing myself as less than or not good enough because I have been faced with negativity about my body or my intelligence from people in my life as well as the media. But I think that it's important for myself and other people, not just women, to start seeing ourselves as worthy and as the wonderful people that we are.

I have heard people telling me for years that I wasn't skinny enough or smart enough and for a long time, I let myself believe them. This was until recently when I saw myself as a smart young woman who can accomplish anything I put my mind to, and the strangest thing was that after that, I saw an increase in my grades that shocked me and my family. It amazed me how much changed after I started telling myself that I could do something instead of telling myself that I couldn't.

I have a similar idea about for my body. I have always heard "maybe if you just worked out more" or something along those lines when someone mentioned my weight. My weight is something that I've always been self-conscious because I felt like there were so many other girls around me who were skinnier than me, which is true, and that that somehow made them better than me. I recently realized that the only reason that I wanted to be like them or compared myself to them was for superficial reasons and that isn't the reason that I would want to motivate myself to get more in shape. I was looking at fitness as something that I would do for other people, not for me and wow I couldn't have been more wrong. Fitness is something that has to be done for me and no one else and for now, I'm okay with how I look. I don't think that I need to change my body to fit someone else's ideas of beauty.

The same goes for makeup. I love wearing makeup, but I wear it for me. Makeup makes me feel more beautiful than I already think that I am without it. It is something that I use to feel even better about myself. Some girls use makeup to make their cheekbones look more pronounced or to draw attention to themselves but I like to use it to make myself feel more confident about my natural beauty, but I still recognize that I'm beautiful without makeup.

I think that people should stop looking at women as things that need to be perfect and start looking at us as wonderfully unique people who are amazing just how we are. Maybe the way to start that is for women to look at ourselves as the amazing people that we are and to stop caring what other people think. I finally woke up one day and looked in the mirror and thought, "Wow. I'm pretty great." Since that day I have had so much more confidence and my self-esteem has risen so much.

I highly encourage everyone, not just women, to start looking at themselves that the wonderful people that we are and not letting anyone else convince us otherwise.