COLUMN: Don't be afraid to stand out

You slowly close your eyes and take the anticipated step onto the scales. Looking down you are greeted with an undesirable double-figured monster, which renders a week of taste deprivation useless. You look down at your body, your mind cruelly emphasising the protrusion of your stomach, or the vast width of your thighs. This situation is unnecessary and the very nature of it aggravates me.

Society itself dictates a lot of lifestyle factors from the aesthetics and price tags of our vehicles, to the amount of hard earned cash we are willing to invest in the latest smartphone or designer jeans. How ludicrous is the idea that we place our confidence into the metaphorical palm of the scales, obsessively comparing our reflections with the airbrushed masterpieces printed on the glossy covers of fashion magazines?

This physical ideology has always been present in mankind. During the Victorian era, chubby, pale women, with cellulite and ginger hair were the social beauties, woven into tapestries and painted into the history books, a glorified personification of wealth.

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As a teenage student, my ears are constantly filled with the disdainful complaints and venting of insecurities from my peers. Their fixation on having toned stomachs, and Kardashian-rivalling backsides frustrates me. There’s nothing wrong with preserving a self-image, and hitting the gym once or twice a week, but when looking in the mirror becomes a source of self-doubt it becomes an issue by default. Why do we allow our weight to limit our confidence, to make us feel unworthy and hopeless? There is no tangible correlation between physical appearance, and other personality traits – charisma, diligence, and loyalty. The illusion that the more beautiful we are, the more successful we are entitled to become is completely unsupported. It’s important to value yourself for yourself, and in the brilliantly applicable words of Oscar Wilde ‘Be yourself, everyone else is already taken’.

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