How to tell if you’re pretty

There’s no way to know for sure!

The life of a teenage girl is, for those of us not blessed with a god-complex and puffed up with arrogance that some label ‘confidence,’ the years that follow turning 13 are ones filled with angst, unbalance, and a general belief that the world is out to get you. Take me, for instance. For the longest time—and I’m not saying I don’t occasionally slip back into the mindset—I wanted constant assurance that I was pretty.

I’d like to say to those girls who whine about how ugly or fat they are to elicit sympathy and flattering, simpering assurances to the contrary: It annoys your friends! Especially those who are bigger than you. There are some Twiggys that I feel like breaking in half when they whine. Just because I’ve mostly gotten over that obligatory period of self-hate doesn’t mean I don’t get bitter.

There will be one day when your friends get so tired of this that they’ll listen to you bitch and moan, and then they’ll shrug and go back to their conversations.

Of COURSE this means you’ve turned into a fat, ugly cow.

Stop creating angst! Life is hard enough without trying to find something to be miserable about. I told a particularly skinny friend—during a particularly morose year of high school—that one of her calves was bigger than the other.

She now has a complex. Of course, it’s always been there, lurking beneath the surface—this self-doubt, the readiness to believe the worst in herself. The calf thing was my attempt to illuminate the fact that there was NOTHING WRONG WITH HER. I think it failed. She now cries when she comes in last during cross-country practice. She’s tall, thin, looks like a model, and I don’t have the time or the inclination to cajole her into being happy with what she’s got when I have my own remainders of crippling self-doubt to deal with. She says she’s fat and when I tell her to shut the hell up she calls me tiny like it’s an insult.

What am I supposed to think about myself?

I am 5’6” and 135 pounds after a rather lazy summer of indolence and gorging. I look in my mirror and see someone who resembles a pregnant girl. I’m almost, ALMOST, happy with myself. I am not, however, tiny. It actually annoys me when people call me that; they don’t know that I still always tense my stomach in public out of a latent sense of misplaced dignity.

At the same time—and let’s take this afternoon for example—I dislike it when people imply I am a cow. My mom comes home for grocery shopping, and I am intensely interested in what she has brought home from that cornucopia of bread isles and smelly lobster tanks. My dad walks in.

“Why are you hovering?” he asks, setting down his own load of groceries. His eyes immediately alight on the frosty container of ice-cream. “Oh. Oh God.”

And just what is that supposed to imply? Just because I decimated the last container in 2.5 days does not make me a pig. My mothers remarks that I need to “take it easy” garner much the same response. I glare and I eat a cereal bar. I’ve taken out a box of those in a day.

So, now I sound like I’m contradicting myself. This is the way of teenage girls. I think I’m fat, I don’t like to be called fat, but I don’t like to be called tiny.

How about don’t call me ANYTHING?

As naïve and stupid as it sounds, I despise that beauty is always a topic, no matter the group I’m hanging out with, no matter the environment. There are so many different perspectives on what makes a person beautiful that it also seems so pointless. How do you judge beauty? For instance, there is a girl at my school who I think looks like a horse and laughs like a donkey, she’s dumb and she’s probably going to have skin-cancer when she’s older, and yet the same boys who make snide comments about her idiocy are the boys that flock to her.

Know why? She’s easy, she gets drunk a lot, and she takes lewd comments in stride. In other words, she’s a nice sounding board. A practice girl, if you will; she’s not real. She’s a stereotype. One day, perhaps (and I stress my uncertainty on this topic) she will grow to be a real person with a real personality.

Girls judge their own beauty by how many guys proposition them. But guys don’t always look for beauty. In my high school, they’re sniffing around for an open pair of legs.

This is turning into some kind of rambling attempt at coherency, probably because I’m so sick of the high school experience that I keep finding new things to talk about and I leave others just hanging there. Please, if there are inconsistencies and unanswered questions, feel free to comment.

My mentality is: I don’t want people to comment about my weight. I like to hear I’m pretty—who doesn’t?—but I don’t want to pummel people into telling me so just so I can soothe wounded or uncertain pride. I want to be able to comment in good fun about how much I ate without someone looking at me in disgust or saying or “you’re so funny, I don’t know how you eat that much and look so skinny.”

A look of awe would be nice, just once in a while. That’s the only reason I mention my eating habits unless it’s just so that I can join in with a conversation that I relate to or complain because I feel like I’m going to explode. I am not skinny; I’m built like a man, in my opinion. I’m mostly muscle, but there’s still a nice layer of fat. And so what? Why do you care? Take what I say and don’t sweep a glance down my body to see if I’m being facetious.

I run an average of 4 miles a day and I eat my body weight in food afterwards. I am a contradiction; I am a 17-year old girl. What more can I say?