When I was little I believed in the magic of a birthday wish, I used to think about the wish I would make for months leading up to my birthday. Some of my earliest wishes were for things like a bike, to be an actress, or to have superpowers. On my 10th birthday, I made a wish that seemed more necessary for me, I wished to be pretty. Every year after that, even including my 19th birthday I have wished to be pretty in some way, shape or form. I have never really considered myself pretty, especially since I do not fit under this umbrella that is considered attractive. I found myself wanting to do things that I never had the confidence to do, like go on a date or wear a certain style of clothing. I kept thinking that I would do all of these things when I am pretty.
I found a song on Spotify one day called Can’t Wait To Be Pretty by Cate, and it summed all of my feelings up in 2 minutes and 37 seconds. Cate talks about being insecure about their looks and how they struggled with their self-image. In addition to this, they also explore the idea that others will not like them since they are “not pretty”. Cate goes on and talks about all of the things that they are going to do when they are “pretty”. Although they talk about their self view, Cate talks about the double standard that we have for ourselves versus the people in our lives. I know from personal experience that I would not let my friends think about their body and their looks in the way that I do for my body, yet I cannot see that what I am doing is also wrong since all bodies and people are beautiful in their own way.
When I listened to this song for the first time I cried, simply because I had never felt so seen. With this song came hope that this would change not for myself but others since one of the main messages about the song is that pretty is just a mindset and any person can be pretty. This is something that I am working on and I know that there are so many others on the same journey with me. Something that is comforting as well as disheartening is that the song has over three million streams on Spotify and almost two hundred fifty-thousand views on youtube. This really means that you are not feeling this alone. Something that hurts is that some of these people could be friends, siblings, family members, or classmates. People that we are supposed to love and make them feel loved and seen feel these same feelings.
There is definitely a social media component to this problem, yet it is never really discussed. You can now see things on platforms like Tik Tok but before this, there were not many outlets for these feelings, and outlets that did exist may not have coped in a healthy way. My hope is that we as a generation and society continue bringing awareness to this idea and destroying this idea of conventional beauty.