To My Fellow Women: Our Skin Is A Canvas And We Are Art

Our skin is a canvas. We are art.

Shapes of different sizes, strokes of different paths and places. Enchanting, seductress creatures of nature. Yet, we have all struggled to look in the mirror and see the masterpiece in front of us.

Numbers define our beauty, the larger the worse. We gasp at a new indentation from cellulite, even though it’s been proven that 94% of women possess this. We chastise ourselves for eating cake and gaining another pound on the hips, but these hips will or have given life to another human being. We sigh at the sight of stretch marks around are thighs, stomachs, and arms. Only these stretch marks show how fierce and strong we became from our past, whether from gaining/losing weight or bearing a child.

Here we are, all women with the same issues. Yet we all compare to each other. We blame society, but it’s really us. We are our own worst enemies. We are the ones with the toxic thoughts. Not them.

We are told at a young age this is how we are supposed to look and we believe it. We don’t shake our heads of the ridiculousness or laugh in distaste. We feed into such poison and end up analyzing the way we look when we sit down, after we’ve eaten, and how we look in the morning.

Girls become younger and younger ages when they start to feel self conscious. We are embarrassed when wearing a bra for the first time. We turn bright red when people visibly see our pads or tampons in our hands. We can’t speak loudly about being sexy because we will be classified as a slut. We can’t wear skirts too short or too long.

But who made these hypothetical rules? Who says these even apply? And why don’t men feel they have a similar honor code to abide by?