Plus-size model Katie Halchishick in O Magazine.

“Beauty is not caused. It is.”

-Emily Dickinson

I feel sorry for those of you out there whose idea of beauty has been completely skewed by society and even more sorry for those who change their own image to fit that mould.

I remember back in the fifth grade, there was this girl that I had a crush on for at least three years. A skinny blonde thing who wanted nothing to do with me, but that didn’t stop me from wanting her. Hell, I even whipped up drawings of a couple smokin’ hot Mortal Kombat characters, cause, you know, fifth grade chicks were all about that.

Or so I assumed.

Apparently Kitana and Mileena didn’t do much for her, though, so after three years, I said fuck it and developed this new crush on another girl who was somewhat of an opposite to the blonde one. She wasn’t large, by any means, but she was bigger. Dark, short hair (and I mean short) and unlike the situation with the blonde, this other girl was interested in me, so we became an “item,” which in fifth grade terms didn’t mean much at all. Some empty promises of kisses behind the backstop and complete avoidance of each other.

You know.

The relationship isn’t the point of this story though.

The point is that I still remember a thought that I had when her and I first got into this thing and it went something like this:

“Aren’t I supposed to be with someone blonder? Someone skinnier? This can’t be my future.”

Isn’t that sad?

I mean, first of all, I thought this girl was forever, but second of all, I was 10 years old for Christ’s sake! I somehow already had it ingrained in my mind that I was supposed to park my Pink Cadillac in Barbie’s Dream House.

Not that blonde and skinny are undesirable traits. They are desirable. They just happen to be the most synonymous with this idea of female perfection that had been and continues to be illustrated by companies like Mattel and Playboy, just to name a couple.

Somewhere along the line my idea of the perfect woman changed, though. I’m not sure if it was in that moment or sometime later on as I don’t remember any kind of epiphany. I just know that there was a shift at some point.

I couldn’t tell you how many girls I had some kind of crush on throughout my adolescence, but I can tell you that the majority, if not all of them, weren’t all that concerned with their image and they definitely weren’t trying to walk in Barbie’s footsteps.

In fact, looking back on some of them, I must have been more attracted to their personality than anything because some of them weren’t even all that physically attractive.

But, they were beautiful and they weren’t even trying to be.

Beauty, after all, is accepting who you are and working it.

It is a fact that 80% of women in the US do not like how they look.

80 percent!

The number one desire of young women is to lose weight. Even when there’s not much weight left to lose.

Among children in grades 1 through 3, 48% want to be thinner. 50% of children between the ages of 8 and 10 are unhappy with their body size. Of those 10 year old children, 81% are afraid of becoming fat.

There is absolutely no harm in wanting to look beautiful. Hell, I want to look beautiful, even when I’m hanging around the apartment in my pyjamas.

The problem here is what you are basing your definition of beautiful off of.

If you spend all your time and effort trying to emulate something you saw in a fashion magazine or on a billboard, unless these advertisements are promoting health and wellness and illustrating this with a myriad of body shapes and sizes, you’re never going to be happy because you won’t even have the slightest idea who you are anymore. Not to mention you’ll end up attracting someone who wants you for who you want to be, not who you actually are.

So don’t be a part of that 80%.

Be proud of your image.

Be kind to your body.

Respect yourself and others will respect you.

The ones that matter will respect you.

And hopefully the rest will eventually start to matter as well.

Within the next couple weeks, the Earth’s population will hit 7 billion.

You may think that with so much unused space in places like Northern Canada and the plains of the U.S., to name a couple of examples close to home, that the population of the human race is not an issue, but at the moment, space has nothing to do with it. It’s the resources we consume and the waste that we produce that we need to think about.

So please, think about it.

I know this is coming off as preachy, and some (most) of you are probably rolling your eyes thinking you’re not even a part of the problem or “this world is going to shit anyways, so why bother” and that one person can’t make a difference, but none of this is true.

We are all a part of the problem.

Almost every bit of trash that goes into it’s designated receptacle and ends up in a landfill is part of the problem. This whole giving up on your species’s place in the history of this planet because everyone else seems to have is a massive problem. It’s cowardly and ignorant and it’s something I’ve been guilty of for a while now.

Sometimes, I can’t help but want to see civilization fall. Sometimes I want to accelerate it’s demise. I want to be a part of a Fight Club style movement that obliterates modern society so that it can be rebuilt in a new, better, more poignant state. I feel like we deserve it. Not all of us, of course, but those of us who know there’s a problem and ignore it and just keep on living a life of excess because it’s easier than fighting for a better tomorrow.

It’s hard not to feel this way.

Some people tend to believe that we are not animals, but with the way we live, we are more animalistic than any other species on this planet. If we truly believed that we had souls and that we had spirits and we wanted them to live on and thrive and end up inhabiting the places we dream of ending up, this is not the way to get there.

If you want to avoid revolt. If you want to avoid a completely uncivilized revolution where millions die just so that this change that was promised to us actually happens, then you have to Ghandi up and be the change you want to see in the world.

You don’t have to march in protest.

You don’t have to stop washing your hair.

You just have to stop and take a look at yourself and realize that you have to make some sacrifices. You have to evolve. You have to shift your mentality away from materialism and consumerism and adopt ideas that take you down a road of self-sustainability and zero population growth and responsibility for your actions and your words, two things we need to stop and think longer and harder about before we put them out into the world.

Start living with your heart and not your bank account.

Start producing your own food and limiting the amount of waste you produce.

Start lending a hand and more hands will be lent to you.

We are at a massive fork in the road right now and we have to choose wisely which avenue we are going to take.

To change or not to change, that is the new question, because being just isn’t working for us anymore.