Main Character Moment
Windows rolled down and top popped off the convertible. The wind is blowing in your hair as you scream the lyrics to a good vibes song. Or maybe you are on a tropical island with a personal photographer. Or perhaps you are on the top of a mountain at sunset, drinking a bottle of champagne with your soul mate. You are a main character and everyone around you are merely extras.
However, this same "main character" is constantly told how ugly they are by the "extras". This leads the main character to critique their own body and their own worth behind closed doors. Perhaps this same main character with over a million followers feels just as lonely as you do. They feel as if the whole world is against them.
How can someone be so perfect yet feel so miserable? How can a main character feel so detached from their own life and feel like they have nothing when they profess to the public they are everything?
That is why this whole notion of a "main character" is so toxic for our society. Telling girls that the only way they can truly live the most perfect life or receive the most attention is if they share every part of themselves online or when they are out in public.
If you don't post, it didn't happen. If you eat pizza, you are fat. If you edit your photos, you are fake. If you make one mistake, you are cancelled.
Being a main character should not mean living a highlight reel. And being a follower on social media should not justify tearing others apart just because you wish you lived the perfect life an influencer makes it out to be.
Living through COVID-19 and quarantine has definitely taken a toll on my mental health, especially having I spend countless hours absorbing toxic content on social media to pass the time. Tik Tok, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook. Peoples' perfect lives are everywhere.
Even during a pandemic, we see celebrities travel to beautiful islands, wearing their sponsored double 0 bikinis. Friends or simply people you follow online venture across the country on fun beach and lake trips or hang with their sorority and fraternity bros at their off-campus houses.
Us girls continue to compare our body sizes to one another. We are constantly tracking who is glowing up or who "let themselves go." It seems like everyone is competing to have that main character moment: a never ending, toxic, miserable quest for attention, validation, and a justification to simply exist.
I can't speak for everybody, but I do know how I feel and what those around me have expressed feeling.
I crave love, purpose, attention, and validation. And it seems these days, the ways to achieve that attention is by being the "main character", "glowing up," or having a "hot girl summer."
The size of our waist, boobs, butts, thighs, necks, jaws, noses, hips, calves, arms are heavily critqued, judged and monitored by ourselves and those around us. It may be easy to say: "the reason I am like this is because everyone else is doing it. Everyone else compares themselves to me, and I have to compare myself to them in order for us to all achieve the beauty standards we have set in stone."
BUT WHY? Why does a "glow up" have to mean literally striving to be NOTHING? To take up no space? To shame others who take up space? We have designed a culture that says being beautiful is being nothing... The smaller our waist, the greater our worth. The greater our worth, the more attention and love we get.
But this is the part that baffles me the most! The public has collectively turned to hateful comments rather than supportive ones.
Social constructs long before us have told girls what it means to be "sexy" and "beautiful", but when girls finally achieve this beauty standard, they are ripped apart to pieces. "You are ugly" "You are still a fat cow" "You are such a whore" "Put some clothes on" "She must have daddy issues" "She's crazy" "How pathetic" "I am better than them why are they even famous?"
Do we see the problem of this? Maybe we don't notice it online, but it manifests itself in day to day conversations with our friends and family members. Gossip is a form of telling others that they will never be good enough unless they try harder.
At this point, it is more clear than ever... it was never the person who is being scolded so critically. It was you and it was me.. it was all of us participating in this toxic cycle.
If you gossip, spread hate online, make comments about girls body sizes or pictures, you are part of the problem. And I am not perfect either. I admit to being at fault for this at times. We constantly are comparing, hating, and judging those around us online and in person. We are so miserable with our own lives that we decided the solution would be to tear down those living the lives we strive to live.
Our judgement, critiques, and envy are merely projections of how we view ourselves. Instead of working on ourselves and taking in our own moments, we are consumed by the lives of others, projecting our internal fears and anxieties onto the ones who make the changes we so desperately desire or are unable to achieve. Even if we do not say these words out loud or post them online, thinking it is toxic on its own.
So here's what we do..
We out with the old and in the with the brand new "Hot Girl Summer Challenge." This challenge has nothing to do with the size of our exteriors. Rather, it is about working on enlarging the size of our hearts, the depths of our knowledge, and the strength of our ability to empower ourselves and others. If we are not mentally glowing, we will never achieve physical happiness.
This is something I have struggled with for years and continue to struggle with. I spend hours staring in the mirror, hours hating myself and the lifestyle I possess. I want to be a fitness model, a singer, a famous You Tuber. I don't want to be me.
It wasn't until quarantine that I truly understood the weight of this issue. I can compare myself to everyone else on the exterior, admiring the activities they participate in so gracefully, hoping and praying to look like them. However, by paying such close attention to the life I do not have, I discredit the opportunities I am given and the internal and external beauty I already have been gifted.
Remember, we are not just cardboard boxes... we are the whole package, filled with beauty on the inside. So why do we care so much about the exterior? Let's glow up together mentally AND physically and for once view ourselves as a worthy main character who isn't perfect but sure as hell holds purpose.
Love,
Moody Girl