Note to My Someday Daughter

*Thank you to Katie Makkai for inspiration for this article*

Realizations call for makeup-less, unedited selfies. Today I asked myself, “What happens if my daughter isn’t pretty?”

This thought really shook me. I remember being in elementary school and having people make fun of my appearance and exclude me because I wasn’t pretty enough for them. Many of us are very aware and very uncomfortable with that fact that being pretty can benefit you, and that ‘not being pretty enough’ or the ‘right’ kind of pretty makes everything – especially in interviews and other occasions where you are being judged on the spot – much more difficult. Perhaps this isn’t a reality in some times and places, but this has unfortunately been my experience.  It took me a really long time to realize there are probably about 10 million more important things in this world than being pretty, yet we value it so highly as a society. I wish it wasn’t though, because it does not have to be this way.

I have done myself a great disservice by always editing my photos and wearing make-up for Instagram.  Let me repeat: wearing make-up for Instagram (that’s a really absurd statement). There is a high amount of pressure in our society to appear perfect, and to actually be perfect. A lot of people on Instagram really do a great job of appearing perfect, but the assumption of what you see on Instagram as what happens in real life is, just like wearing make-up for Instagram, absurd. Yet, I feel like a lot of us fall into the trap of seeing this ‘perfection’ and asking ourselves why we can’t be perfect or prettier.

Honestly, about 95% of the time I look the way I do in this photo – hair down and barely brushed, no make-up. Bearing uneven skin tone, pimples, uneven eyebrows. And that’s okay by me.

I met my friend Cole when I looked like how I normally do, how I look in this photo. One day when I was beating myself up because I just didn’t feel pretty, Cole just said, “Do you remember how you looked the day I met you?” I sassily replied yes (purely because I have an amazingly funny photo of me and my friend Meg from that day so I actually did), in which he replied something along the lines of, “I don’t.”

The point is, I am so much more than my uneven skin tone, pimples, and uneven eyebrows. I am so much more than cute outfits, beautiful make-up, or a "Goals" kind of Instagram account. I am the person that Cole met on that volunteering trip last Winter. I am the several dozen cookies that I brought back to school for my friends after winter break. I am my anthropology papers, my philosophical conversations, my phone calls back home. I am a leader, a friend, a sister, a daughter, a scientist, and a student. I cannot be contained in or bounded by merely ‘pretty’, and neither will my someday daughter.

I’m not going to sit here on social media with some inspirational caption about loving yourself when it’s attached to my highly edited photo that I took after an hour of doing my make-up. That’s completely counterproductive to the point I want to make. I am absolutely not trying to knock people that wear make-up and edit their photos on Instagram when I say this, because I love my Tarte In Bloom palette just as much as the next make-up junkie. I’m not going to sit here and say I don’t feel great when my make-up is on fleek and my outfit is on point – if I did, I would be straight lying. But I know there are people that don’t see me every day probably assume I look like the rest of my Instagram photos every day - I don’t. That is why it’s so much more important for me to show my messiness, my uneven skin, my acne. I need my someday daughter to know that my great make-up and outfit days were occasional. I wish my someday daughter could watch me walk to class in a t-shirt with coffee stains on it, no make-up, and my hair unbrushed.

I need my someday daughter – and anyone out there that thinks I have everything together 24/7 – to see my messiness, my uneven skin, my REAL LIFE self. It’s more important now than ever because our someday children will be the first to see a ton of pictures of us, their first role models, documented on sites like this one.

“This, this is about my own some-day daughter. When you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity, begging, ‘Mom, will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?’ I will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer, ‘No! The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters. You will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing. But you, will never be merely 'pretty'’.” – Katie Makkai, Pretty