It seems we have this fascination, this obsession, with how our life looks to others, we crave acceptance from complete strangers. We want to be the right amount of different from everybody else, you know, different enough to be interesting but not too different that we are labeled weird. We work so hard to portray some perfect image of ourselves, when in reality--none of us have it as together as we are pretending anyway.

Why do we care so much what other people think? Why do we feel envious of others’ lives when our own life is pretty great? What is with this need to want what we can’t have, to want something that already belongs to someone else? Why are we constantly comparing ourselves to other people? I believe it all boils down to our own insecurities and dissatisfaction with parts of our own lives.

Let’s face it--people can be just plain mean for no reason. We try so hard to look like we have it together because if we didn’t, we would make an easy target. Let me tell you something, the real world and the internet are full of wicked people. Bullies lurk behind computer screens, just waiting for the perfect moment to tear you apart.

Recently, I’ve seen memes and tweets from grown women bragging about how often they screen shot other women and tear them apart in their vicious group chats with their girlfriends. How lame are you, like seriously, why are you bragging about bringing another woman down? You are the weird one and someone should kindly escort you off the planet.

I won’t put myself on a pedestal and act like just because I’m writing this, I’m not a part of the problem. I don’t care who you are, we are all guilty of letting our inner Regina George come out to play more often than we’d like to admit. I’m writing this to all women out there today because I decided I could be a lot nicer to a lot of people, myself included, and maybe you could too. I discovered loving yourself is the cure to your toxic emotions.

I came to the conclusion that I need to work on me. I need to do a better job at loving myself, at being happy in my own skin. It sounds cliché, but I’ve found that the first step at not being a bitter, miserable bitch all the time is, first, showering your own self with kindness and love. Loving yourself, it sounds like it should be easy, but it’s not, especially when society has unrealistic expectations how women today should look and act in order to be considered beautiful. The first step is figuring out where the root of your attitude problem lies.

For me, much of my cattiness comes from my own insecurities about my body and appearance. I’d be lying if I said I never called a girl in a short tight dress a slut (in my head of course) simply because she filled it out better than I could. I’d be lying if I said I never glared at a passing by female simply because she was pretty and my boyfriend was near. I’d be lying if I said I never undermined my own beauty because I felt threatened by somebody else’s.

Once you figure out where you are unhappy with yourself, you can start working on learning to love that part of you, or maybe just even hate it a little less. In due time, I’ve learned to channel that feeling of wanting what someone else has into motivation, into admiration, into things that don’t hurt. The current world population is 7,437,706,177 and it’s rapidly increasing by the second. All of those people in this world, all of them beautiful, knowledgeable and successful in their own ways.

So you see, next time you compare yourself to Mila Kunis, to Beyoncé, to your best friend, to the girl next to you in the gym, think about that number. You are bound to find millions of people in that number who you believe are smarter than you, more successful than you, more beautiful than you, simply better than you. Guess what, that person you just compared yourself to, well they are up against that same number, they’ve compared themselves to you and plenty of other women and they too, have felt unhappy with themselves afterwards. 7,437,706,177 is a scary number and if you live a life where you’re always in competition with that number, you will lose every time. That is, until you love yourself and forget about that big stupid number.

I’ve found a refreshing amount of peace in my journey to loving myself. I found that those feelings of envy and jealousy, the need to compare myself, those feelings have left me for the most part, sure, they still visit from time to time but they check out quickly, they do not linger around in the depths of my soul like they used to. I’ve realized I feel better about myself when I look in my neighbor’s bowl, not to make sure I have just as much or more than them, but to make sure that they have enough.