Teens all over the world struggle with being happy with their appearance. Many things play into that. From skin color, height, body type, and acne, there is always a teen who doesn’t completely love themselves. Social media nowadays isn’t for the fun posts about your morning coffee, or a picture of the sunset off of your patio. Social medias such as instagram have turned into a competition. Who has the best hair, who has smile is the biggest, who had the nicer vacation, who’s outfit cost the most money? All of these things are displayed on social media and put into our heads daily without us even realizing it. Simply scrolling down Instagram and seeing your elementary best friend going on vacation to Cabo would make the majority of us jealous. Posting a picture of your vacation doesn’t mean their intentions were to rub it in your face. They are simply enjoying their vacation and could be sharing it with distant friends or family. But teens tend to see things the other way around.

Many teens will see someone posting a picture while they enjoy their dream vacation and get jealous. Who wouldn’t? We all want to be on vacation when we can and seeing other people enjoying what we want can suck. But it get especially hard when we see other people’s appearance and suddenly become unhappy with ours. Seeing someone your age, younger, or older, with a physical feature we want gets hard. Getting on instagram and seeing someone with hair down to their waist that you’ve always wanted but have never been able to grow gets hard. We start doubting ourselves and in a sense bullying ourselves. We get upset that we don’t have the clear glowing skin of a model that we follow, or the money to buy all the newest trends. When using social media it can get frustrating cause you don’t understand why these random people get what you want. The truth is, we don’t see the full picture of it all.

The girl going on vacation 6 times a year may have 3 jobs that she juggles in order to live her dream of traveling the world. The girl with the “perfect” body that you’ve always wanted could have had body image issues herself and she worked to get the body she has. We all just assume that these people didn’t have to work for what they got. Because let’s be real, none of us are going to want to get on instagram to see someone at work, and as much as we don’t want to admit it, we do want to see their vacations. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t follow them. Loving yourself can be one of the most difficult things a teen has to do. It has to come from within, and it has to come from you. I have personally dealt with how I view myself and I am still working on it today. Once those images of “the perfect person” is put in our head, it’s hard to accept that we’re not going to look like them.

We are all our own individual people and we can’t expect to look like someone else. We all put a lot of pressure on ourselves to look the best and be the best, and when that doesn’t come easy to us we start to get upset with ourselves. Loving yourself isn’t easy, but once you do everything will get easier.