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Girls and the Perfect Teen Body: I Don’t Need One

Teens spend a lot of time and energy developing their identities. They search for who they are and what they stand for. They work to identify their friends are and the way they treat others. And they decide how they want to present themselves to the world.

fashion-magazinesThey make all these decisions against a backdrop of parental and societal assumptions that can sometimes be unkind and feel limiting. Often, these expectations can cause pressure, doubt, and confusion. That’s why it’s so powerful to hear one teen, Aisha Brown, voice her belief in herself. May her words inspire all of us to appreciate who we are and what we have to offer.

The Bible says that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. That’s all I’ve got to say on that subject.

Truthfully, what has being perfect done for anyone anyway? What has the right curves in the right places ever done for a relationship? Does it make a person more sane, or in constant need of greater gain? No. Does it expand your horizons, or limit you to one category of humanity? Not really. Does it erase issues in your family? Not at all. Does it cause internal voices to cease? I don’t think so. Does it patch up the broken pieces of a third-world country? Absolutely not.

How can we treasure something so heavily, when it does absolutely nothing for our lives? If anything, striving for the perfect body inevitably causes more complications to arise. The perfect body is not worth the fight.

Instead of thinking about all the things that you cannot do because your body is not perfect, think of all the things you can do with the perfect body; then, think of how long those advantages will last. The perfect body is no longer perfect but engineered, a mold no girl can fit into even if she tried because she was perfectly created to be an imperfection.

Aisha is a member of Lake Erie Ink, a writing space for youth in Cleveland, Ohio.

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