I’m a skinny girl and always have been, I was born that way but I never thought it was a good thing. I never wanted to be skinny. I was bullied in school for being too skinny, even by my teachers, I was called names and got all kinds of comments and questions.

“You are way too skinny”, “Are you sick?”, “Did you forget to eat breakfast?”, “You need to eat more”, “You shouldn’t starve yourself”, “Skeleton!”, “Paper!”, “Do you ever eat?” , “Here honey, eat this candy you need it more than I do”

So because people consider me to be skinny, people assume that I’m doing something on purpose to be skinny and they look down to me thinking , “Poor her, she’s probably hungry”.

I lost a lot of weight when I changed schools when I was 9 years old. I was anxious to go to school everyday, I didn’t fit in and I didn’t know anybody. I lost my appetite for a few months and ate very little. I didn’t have much control over it, to be able to eat something someone had to tell me a story or a movie had to be playing in front of me so I could think about something else because the thought of going to school made me feel nauseous. So that made me go from being skinny to being so skinny you could almost see all of my bones, they stood out of my skin like huge mountains all over my body.

There were times where I hated my body, I just wanted to hide it under baggy clothes so people wouldn’t see how skinny I was. I hated when people told me “You’re so skinny!” they thought they were giving me a compliment and that’s sweet but it just reminded me of how unhappy I was with my body.

The grass is always greener on the other side, right?

Girls used to say to me that they wanted to be skinny like me, and I didn’t understand that. I wanted to look like them but I wasn’t allowed to say that to them because I was supposed to be happy with my skinny body because that’s what everybody wanted, to be skinny.

In the beginning of my teenage years I got so sick of wanting to look like someone else, so sick of hearing girls complain about their body, so sick of feeling like nobody was good enough, sick of feeling like everyone in the world had to look a certain way to be beautiful.

Wouldn’t the world be so boring if we all looked the same?

Wouldn’t the world be so boring if we were all perfect?

I had a friend when I was 15 who struggled with depression and self-hatred. She was in a dark place for a long time, she talked really negatively about herself, she seemed delusional. Just a few months later after we met, her father passed away, which made her sink even deeper into her depression. I didn’t know what to say to her but I knew that I wanted to help her in some way. For some time I tried everything that I could think of to help build up her confidence and get her to love herself the way she is. I told her she was beautiful but she didn’t want to believe me. When I would ask her if she was okay when I saw very clearly that she was not, she would shake her head with a smile and say she was fine. I knew she was having darker thoughts than she was telling me. She showed me scars that she had all over her legs and she acted like it was no big deal. I told her to call me whenever she felt down, I lived a 5 minute walk away from her, I came running whenever she needed me. Then one day she told me that she would listen to me sing whenever she felt low. She would listen to my covers on YouTube as they always made her feel better. That was one of the most beautiful things anyone had ever said to me. It made me so happy to know that my voice could make her feel better, even for just a minute. When I had been worrying about finding ways to help her and lift her up and never felt like I was doing enough, this was all she needed, to hear me sing. But why couldn’t she see what I saw, I mean this girl is probably the funniest person I’ve ever met, she is smart, she has huge blue eyes, a beautiful smile and her heart is made out of gold. She saw something else and I still can’t imagine what is was that she saw when she looked in the mirror, I don’t want to know what she saw, I just want her to see what I see, because when I look at her, I see real beauty.

We all try to “fit in” we put on a mask, we pretend and we try to change ourselves for other people to accept us and take us seriously.

We come in all sizes, all kinds of shapes, all kinds of colours, no one is the same, people have different personalities, different voices, different opinions, different families and cultures. There isn’t just one kind of beauty in this world, there are over 7 billion beauties. So why do we spend so much time and energy to look and act the same? Why should someone be better than the other? Why are we so afraid of what’s different?