Recently, I watched – “Nappily Ever After” and it made me think about how women are killing themselves to look perfect, to look prettier, have fabulous hair, and to look what society wants them to look like!!
There are so many external beauty factors young women (13 to 30) keep bothering themselves with, due to societal expectations, media, and peer pressure.
Personality is important and not the outer looks, is what I believe strongly.
You want to look good, look good, but if under pressure, then hey! You need to think girl what looking good is!
We’ve been tricked into thinking that if we look slimmer, well-dressed, pretty, have good body shape, perfect hair, and fair skin, we are the best ones and successful as well.
All the thoughts jumping inside the mind, like “I need to look good because people make a perception about me if I don’t!”, “I need to wear such and such kind of clothes, shoes, accessories, etc. to ensure people like me.”
Oh, My God!! Are we living our lives for ourselves or others???
And what does that “Looking Good “mean?? Does it mean that you need to have fair skin, skin that is glowing irrespective of the fact that your dancing hormones are uncontrollable with the changes going inside your body, does that mean that you have to eat less and keep starving, and taking laxatives to try to reshape your figures to fit what you believe is “the ideal” as revealed on social media?
Just because of societal pressure we keep pushing ourselves to do things that we are not happy to do…we try to be someone we don’t want to…just because we want acceptance from others. What about the acceptance of YOU by YOU?
Appearance-related social pressure has developed a negative body image and self-esteem as well as severe mental disorders during adolescence.
As a child, I faced a lot of humiliation for dark skin, skinny looks, and simple attire. I compared myself with other girls around me, I felt bad, depressed, and lonely, and sometimes felt that ‘I am born imperfect’. But thanks to my parents who always told me one thing, “Outer beauty can be bought, it can be pretended, it has a short life, but inner beauty is natural, it can’t be pretended, it lasts forever.” That always helped me accept myself the way I am and eventually I learned to focus on what matters in life.
There’s nothing wrong in wanting to look good and being healthy for oneself, but it’s so important to draw the line and remember that nobody’s self-worth comes from how you look or the perfect make-up or beautiful hair or high fashion clothes.
It comes from deep within your heart and is for nobody to see. It is an experience.
Live your life the way you want, I feel it’s time to stop striving for what others want you to be like and celebrate what you are and what you want to be!
Let Your Hair down!
Let your heart out!
Let the light in!
“98% of girls feel pressure to look a certain way”
The mindset that builds up at the age from 13 to 21 lasts longer, sometimes forever. Unfortunately, many times it starts at HOME, especially in Indian families and we find little progress in eradicating this ‘classic’ Indian standards of beauty. It starts from childhood, grows at adolescence and exacerbated as we get older.
Being woman is stressful many times! Even after so many years there is still the societal pressure and now added more with the media around for women to look good, slim, well-dressed, meet the demand to be perfect. The biggest problem is that when women are not able to achieve the perfection, they feel bad and some fall into depression.
With the world changing and more social media hype, it is very important that girls are educated to be confident in who they are, build resilience from a young age, to create an amazing start.
Here are my thoughts on how the young women are falling prey to the unnecessary pressure of being perfect!
What are your thoughts? Do share