Today’s guest post [very first one ya’ll!!!!] is from Janna Hall of My Beautiful Catharsis and serves as reminder to all girls and women: stop being someone you’re not despite what the media is handing you daily and start being you! Because there’s no one else in this world that is better at being well…You! I couldn’t agree more! Around here at SGS we are constantly dissecting and beating those too present stereotypes to a pulp! Thanks to Janna for sharing her thoughts, inspiration and honesty! 

It’s So Cliché…but “Be yourself; everyone else is taken” is a mantra that we need to carry on throughout our life. As kids, we grow up wanting to be like the girls on TV. My best friend and I couldn’t sit through a show or a movie without shouting, “I’M HER!” every time the prettiest girl came on the screen. For us, it was Clueless.  From the moment Stacey Dash hops into Cher’s Jeep, we thought of every reason to ditch who we were and immediately wanted to look like, sound like, and be Dionne. Or the pink Power Ranger. Or Beyonce. Or in my best friend’s case, Britney. From a young age, we’re almost programmed to want to be everyone else, whether it’s a Disney princess, a pop icon, or the popular girl in school. It’s so wonderful to pretend, but what happens when we’re adults and realize that we’re actually not those women, nor will we ever be them? In the midst of our fantasies, we’ve grown to hate ourselves, not because of who we are, but because of who we aren’t. We aren’t those princesses. We aren’t those girls who, with one quick, flirty glance fall in love and live happily ever after with our Prince Charming. We aren’t those celebrities who have picture perfect bodies. We aren’t them. We are who we are. I am Janna. You are you. Somewhere down the path of pretending, we’ve placed more focus on the body we don’t have than our own reality. Somewhere down that path, we’ve snapped from fantasy land and traveled down the path of self-loathing. We’re obsessed with someone else’s beauty so much so that everything we see when we look in the mirror is repulsive. We’re so obsessed with someone else’s life that our own reality, no matter how fabulous it may be, seems worthless. We wander through life wanting to be someone else, while letting the person we were created to be wither away.