I sit up in bed, dangle my feet off the bed and shut the annoying alarm off that is reminding me it's a new day. I walk to the bathroom and splash water on my face to help wake me up. After so I dry myself off with a towel and look in the mirror. I stand there and stare at the person in front of me. “Is that really me?”
While I evaluate myself picking out every flaw that I can see. The Evil Queen from Snow White said “mirror, mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all?” but I think she was really asking the mirror what she had become, thinking she didn’t recognize her own reflection.
Society is constantly putting a label on us and what we should look. Constantly placing using into categories to “define” us a person. We are being always being discriminated by race, sexual orientation, religion, age, gender.
However, the categorization of people goes beyond the main discriminatory factors we hear about in everyday life. Growing up in this large world we are judged. We are judged based on our weight, height, hair color, where you work, your education, your political views, what you wear, what you listen too. You’re always being judged and you can’t stop it besides to embrace who you are and never change who that is.
Around every corner, there is always going to be another bully another tabloid trying to change who you should be. But as long as you know who you are then you can get through it.
Eventually, the nonstop harassment by society to be something eats away our self-esteem and forces us to confirm out of a desire to have some form of identity.
It wasn’t until I was twenty-one when I realized how I was defining myself in the mirror when I looked in it each morning. That was not the woman I wanted to be.I had lost so much of myself in trying to be like everyone else, like the girls in the magazine, and like what the world wanted me to be, that scrapping all that away would leave me naked. That ideology of taking away all the parts of myself that were not authentic was frightening, but that was the only way that I could transform myself into a person I wanted to be. That it wasn’t until recently that I realized I want never going to nor did I want to live up to society's expectations.Remember, it is not how others define you, but how you define yourself.
