"We're enough, everything else be damned"

Without a snapchat filter to cover my dark circles, I’m sitting in my pyjamas. I decided not to dress up. Because I’ve realised that the internet has never actually represented every facet of our lives. The good parts- they’re plastered on every social media account. But the real parts go forgotten.

The real parts, what are they, really? They’ve become so easy to conceal, that the version of ourselves that we present to the world doesn’t even exist. Because we are so much more than our best days. Social media sees our good hair days and our curated morning workout routines. But what about the several days we don’t feel like getting out of bed at the crack of dawn to go for a run? Or the days when we stuff our faces with all the wrong kinds of food? What about the days when we wake up to hair that is so all over the place that we look like we’ve been mildly electrocuted?

Somewhere along the way, the real parts of us got lost. We’ve all been victims of it, myself included. So this is my attempt to be real, and to break down the very complex idea that pretending has started coming naturally to us. But maybe “fake it till you make it” has gone too far this time. When did vulnerability start being treated as a weakness? Maybe it was around the time that society started placing impossible expectations on what a body should look like. Pair that with the rapid rise in the popularity of social media, and it explains why most of us think that we have to pretend. No wonder we present only select parts of ourselves to the world.

Because what would everyone think? It’s not just the “perfect” body we see on social media anymore. It’s seeped into our psyche. And the psyche of those around us. If we’re not size zero, we’re told to lose weight, our health be damned. If we don’t have curves, we’re told to wear body shapers, organ compression be damned. If we’re flat, we must switch to padded, personal discomfort be damned. And if we’re hungry, we start appetite suppressants, insomnia and anxiety be damned. Let’s say we’re too tall. Then, we start doing weights, otherwise “is se kaun shaadi karega?”, our individual worth be damned. But if we’re too short, we get on height-increasing pills, nerve pain be damned. If our skin is bad, we must eat nothing but salad, our mental health be damned. And let’s say we still manage to reach our destination of self-love? It’ll never be good enough, all our efforts be damned.

Our obsession with looking a certain way has led to us forgetting what actually matters. We’ve perfected an act that shouldn’t have ever needed perfecting. Why do we have to reduce ourselves to a beauty standard, when in reality, we are so much more than that standard? We are more than the number we see on the weighing scale, because it can’t measure our health. We are more than the texture of our skin, our height, or the diet we’re following. We are enough, because that standard that we have been aspiring to says absolutely nothing about us. We are enough, everything else be damned.