BEING YOU-NIQUE

Trapped within the walls of stereotypes, social expectations, traditional gender roles and responsibilities, the world’s finest artists and human beings are suffocating and are being snuffed out. 

Why can’t you put makeup on if you’re a boy? Makeup is not a gender-specific activity, it’s a form of expression open to anyone and everyone.

What’s wrong with being attracted to someone of your same gender? Love is love, be it in any form. It is neither ‘unnatural’ nor ‘abnormal’ because who decides what’s normal anyway? Love is a beautiful phenomenon and everyone deserves to cherish it in their own way.

Although society has started being more tolerant and accepting in recent times, the LGBTQ+ community has been horribly repressed and shunned for centuries. They are not treated as equals or even human beings at times. And for what? For being who they are? For loving someone? For being different?

You can be whoever or whatever you want to be. Remember that the sky is the limit. Don’t bury your ambitions just because they have been labelled ‘not normal for you’, ‘not for your gender’, ‘not what society accepts/expects’.

Don’t let them tell you that you will fail. Prove them wrong. This piece of advice is for anything and everything you do in life; ranging from your career to finding yourself to your sexual identity.

 Make a decision and stand by it. You have to be your best and worst judge to deal with the ones who tell you that you can’t do it.

We can never please everybody. It may be a hard pill to swallow for many of us but it’s a fact. There will always be one person (or more often, more than one) in the crowd who WILL criticise anything and everything that you do. One can never do anything ‘just right’.

Society has ridiculous expectations that no one seems to be able to meet. Oh, all of us can bend over backwards trying to be “perfect” and many of us do, but we never reach the mark. So why try so hard to fit in when you know you will be miserable? Be you and be happy!

You’re either too skinny or too fat, too short or too tall, ‘slutty’ or a prude, too quiet or too loud, the list just goes on and on. 

Some girls are ‘too girly’, while others are tomboy-ish. They are told that they need to wear makeup to be beautiful but not too much or then they will be ‘too fake’. Society demands them to be curvy in order to be desirable, but there’s a fine line between curvy and fat, and “nobody likes fat girls, do they?”. 

So many young girls look at the perfectly skinny models on Instagram or in magazines and think that they need to look like them. They starve themselves in order to be skinny and end up with major eating disorders. No one tells them that you don’t need to look like them, you just need to be you. Body-image issues are now so common, no matter the gender or anything. 

And of course, women aren’t the only ones who have to deal with set beauty standards; men are also supposed to look a certain way. They should be tall (because who would date a short guy pftt), buff and well-built. 

Boys are expected to be ‘manly’ and dominant. Society teaches boys to not show any kind of emotions from a young age. They can’t cry because “men don’t cry.” Bottling up emotions and feelings lead to a whole other set of problems that they have to deal with later in life.-

Another huge problem I want to bring to light is of how men are made fun of using ‘like a girl’. I won’t delve deep into this topic because that is a whole blog for another day. But, throwing around phrases like ‘crying like a girl’, ‘running like a girl’, ‘screaming like a girl’, strengthens gender stereotypes, even if it’s a “joke”. 

The essence I want everyone to take away is that ‘THEY’ will ALWAYS have something to say about everything. What REALLY matters is what YOU think and feel.

Remember that YOU have to live your life and not ‘them’. Don’t do what ‘they’ tell you to. DO YOU. Find yourself and your passions. You are an amazing person with all the potential. All you have to do is to tap into that.