Do you think I'm pretty?

Let me be the first to say that if something empowers you, do it.  If you look good today and you want to take a picture and share it with people and that makes you feel good, then by all means POST THAT SHIT CUZ YOU LOOK HAWT GURRRLLLLLLL.   Or maybe you’ve had the same profile picture for, like, two whole weeks and it’s time for a change.  Perhaps you need a forum to showcase your superior duckfacing skills.  I’m not condemning selfies.  Take pride in your appearance.  Express yourself.  But please, your physical appearance is not your single most redeeming quality and it will NEVER define who you are.

To quote Rachel Simmons:

"If you write off the endless stream of posts as image-conscious narcissism, you'll miss the chance to watch girls practice promoting themselves—a skill that boys are otherwise given more permission to develop, and which serves them later on when they negotiate for raises and promotions."  

Yes, but this isn’t really the reasoning behind the selfies I see on a regular basis (unless the thing you’re promoting about yourself is your cleavage), for either girls OR boys.  It seems that so many of the selfies I’m seeing on my various social media feeds have been posted with the purpose of garnering attention (well, DUH), specifically attention from people who are going to tell you how great you look.  Why do you need 2678202890837 different hashtags?  So that complete strangers can access your photo via these hastags and you can reap even more compliments?  Oh, your selfie has a quote for the caption?  Never mind, you’re not showing off how full and luscious your eyelashes look under a pound of mascara- you’re just DEEP.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with affirmation, but it’s become more than that- it’s become a crutch.  If nobody liked any of your photos, if nobody commented “so gorgeous <3” on any of them, would you continue to post them?  I hope so, because I hope you’re posting them for YOU because YOU think you look great, rather than to boost your self-esteem.

This doesn’t stop with selfies though.  It’s in tweets, and Facebook statuses, and Vines, it’s everywhere we see social media (it’s even in blog posts).  This is how we live now.  We tell everyone what we’re doing every moment of the day in hopes that they’ll tell us we’re a cool person.  Guess what?  You ARE a cool person.  And I don’t need to see how good you look in a mini-skirt or read about how much money you make to know that.  I don’t need to see any more captions about how cute your hair looks without even using a straightener because OF COURSE it does.  People have been around for longer than straighteners, for longer than electricity even, and they have ALWAYS been beautiful whether they were able to broadcast it to the world or not.

Even if it didn’t start this way, even if you post things with no care in the world about how many people comment on it, it’s a slippery slope.  What starts as something fun that makes you feel good about yourself, can quickly spiral into a dependency on approval from others.  And that’s scary.

I get it.  Healthy self-esteem can be hard.  It’s a product of your upbringing, your peers, and society, among other forces.  At the end of the day though- it’s all you.  There’s no shortcut to feeling comfortable with who you are.  Likes are not a currency that you can buy confidence with.  Confidence comes from within.

Jazmin