You Are Not Your Dress Size

You are not your dress size. Let me make this perfectly clear, because we live in a world where girls are treated as a set of numbers, as something to box up in a pretty package and sit on a shelf to collect dust with the other shiny, tragic things.

You are not your dress size, or how many calories you ate today, or whether or not there is a gap between your thighs. You are not what the girls at school whisper when you walk by, and you are not what the boys say about you in the locker rooms.

You are not who you were at 13, and that is a beautiful thing too. You are not what anyone tells you to be.

You are made up of the songs you listen to at 2:00 am when you're sad, the way you play with your hair when you're nervous, and your off key singing. You are made up of the stars you wish upon and the prayers you send up when you're feeling desperate. You are too much cream in your coffee and your favorite pair of tights, and the long lost dust jackets to books you know better than yourself.

You are what you have and what you've lost; respect, friends, coat buttons. You are the one that got away and the one that stayed too long. You are not your ex-lovers, but what happened after they left. You are learning to save yourself instead. You are made of whispered "I love you"s and midnight phone conversations. You are the ghost of a memory of a person that once meant the world to you.

You are future plans that may never come to fruition. You are in the stubs of plane tickets you haven't purchased yet, and made up of first snowfalls and red lipstick and your favorite plaid shirt when you were 11.

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You are not a GPA or a college major or a lifetime of insecurities, and they won't define you if you don't let them. You are made of the same matter of the sea and the stars, and you are twenty years of hope and broken promises and turquoise nail polish.

In the end, you are only what you want to be. The only things that can define you are the ones that you let do so. You are not what your teachers or your best friends or your neighbors say about you, but sometimes you should listen to them anyway. You are everything that you've ever wanted to do, and all the things that you've done. And you deserve to be described as more than a dress size or a color or a gender.

You cannot be described in a word or a sentence, a seven year old journal entry or an encyclopedia, but your favorite songs say more about you than the people you've dated. And no matter what or who or how you are, you are beautiful and fearless and you should always remember that.

You are not your dress size or the elastic marks around your hips. You are a person, and all the heartbreak and mess and beauty that the word implies. You are you.

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