As some of you may know from either getting to know me or from reading a few of my past articles, I work in a clothing store where our main customer focus is on teenagers. I bring this up because this article was inspired by something that happened to me while I was at work a few days ago.

So, it's not unusual for people to come into the store I work at and complain that we do not carry plus sizes in the store and then accuse me of personally discriminating against them (even though I work for a corporation and have no control over any of that...but I wrote a whole other article about that already titled The Life of a Retail Worker: Discrimination Accusations). But this time, when a customer complained and I explained that our plus sizes were not selling well with the teenagers who shop in the store so they stopped sending them to us and made them "online only," instead of accusing me of discrimination, this woman had a different approach.

She looked at me and said, "Oh, so I guess I can only shop here if I look like you. I have to be a skinny twig."

Umm...excuse me? First of all, what exactly did she want me to say to that? Did she want me to agree? Did she want me to fight back? I'm still not sure in all honesty. I was completely in shock that she said that to me. I was just trying to do my job. If you ask me a question I am going to answer it honestly, and I gave her the honest answer which was simply that we do not carry her size in our store. I wasn't trying to make her feel bad about herself because of her size, so please don't attack me because of mine.

Second, we all need to learn to be comfortable in our own skin. The world is full of people who are all different shapes and sizes, so why can't we embrace that instead of putting ourselves and others down. Just because this woman didn't fit into the sizes that my store sells doesn't mean that she didn't look great! There was absolutely nothing wrong with how she looked, but because we don't sell her size in a store that targets 13-year-olds, she seemed to think that there was. And yes, I do fit into most of the clothes that I sell. Why should I apologize for that? I am built very short and petite and there is nothing that I can do about that either. In fact, there was a time that I hated how short I was but eventually, I got over it and now I like my size and I am comfortable in my body.

My point is that there is no perfect size or perfect body. No one should be striving to be something that they're not. Don't put people down because they look different than you do. And more importantly, embrace what you have and love yourself.