I’m sitting on a beach in a chair, feeling the ocean breeze the sand beneath my toes, and I can smell salt water, and it’s the perfect summer day. But I have often wondered what it might be like to live under the sea like a mermaid. Maybe I would be a sea turtle and happily swimming with a group of friends, or perhaps I would be a colorful fish swimming with a school of fish. For as long as I can remember, the life beneath the depths of the ocean has always been something I have been curious about. I’ve never been scuba diving or snorkeling, and even though I hate getting my feet wet, I would someday want to see what lies beneath the crashing ocean waves.

Unfortunately, swimming is one of the things that I gave up on when I was probably twelve because I felt so insecure when wearing a swimsuit. I worried about other people judging me for how I looked, and being positive about my body was a foreign concept to me at the time. Even now, it sometimes is, too. Before I turned twelve, life was simple, and I didn’t mind spending hours swimming in a public pool. I never cared what other people thought of my appearance when I was younger. However, once I realized that I’m not the type of girl who adds up to most beauty standards, that was when I began to find myself less beautiful.

As young women, we are exposed to unhealthy images of skinny models in magazines and social media. It’s always been challenging to read a magazine of any kind targeted toward women without seeing unrealistic ideas of what a woman should look like. I never thought of myself as anything other than a girl who didn’t conform to usual beauty standards. When I was growing up, I was told a lot through magazines and social media posts that I saw that the way I looked wasn’t okay just because I looked different from other women.

But since society has an unrealistic image of what all women should look like, I’ve spent much less time on social media and don’t find myself reading many magazines either. So, instead of listening to society’s unrealistic beauty standards, I soon decided that if I were comfortable with how I looked, I wouldn’t let anyone else’s opinion of what I looked like get in the way of that. As long as my boyfriend finds me beautiful, I’m okay with not looking like everyone else. I might not be a wannabe Barbie doll, but I am beautiful. My body might never look perfect by society’s standards, but that’s okay because I am comfortable in my skin, and I don’t care what other people think about how I look anymore. I might not feel comfortable showing off my bare skin in a swimsuit again. However, at least I can finally say that I consider myself beautiful.

This was written by our editor and writer, Hanna Perry.