Beautiful… how do you describe the word “beautiful”? Over the last few days I have observed people making some pretty serious judgments on that very word. Society has a pretty harsh standard that the world is suppose to live up to in order to be “beautiful”. Perfect hair, perfect teeth, tall, slender, puffy lips, big breasts and the list goes on and on and on. And really, who came up with the standards of “perfect” anything!?
Growing up I wasn’t even considered attractive, let alone beautiful. I had big ears, big teeth, was rail thin, with no breasts, long, straight dirty dish water blondish hair, and was a complete tom boy. I grew up thinking that my ears being big was a bad thing, my teeth not aligned perfect or was a little on the large side wasn’t good and having little to no breasts was a complete curse! It is a heavy burden to bare carrying around all this pressure to be “normal” or “beautiful” or whatever word you want to pin to it. I didn’t lack in the friend department, but never really had a boyfriend so to speak. I was like “one of the guys” and didn’t go to a dance in my entire middle school or high school life. I know… awwww poor Pattie. No, not really. I didn’t have the desire to go because I didn’t know how to dance anyway! :o)
After high school the ugly duckling started to turn into a somewhat swan. I started to develop and started looking like a woman and not a string bean kid. I truly wasn’t sure how to feel in this new body. Boys started to notice me but always in the back of my mind I wasn’t sure if I was pretty enough or good enough for certain boys. Puberty sucks! End of story!
