Not everybody is beautiful.

One beautiful lonely evening in the Costa del Salford, sitting in my living room with one eye on Big Brother and another on my Facebook newsfeed, my eyes came to rest on this picture:

You've probably seen the kind before. Girls like to share them as a way of celebrating the fact that they're not special but that they are proud of themselves anyway, or something. It has become the fashion to slate or mock skinny girls and guys with six-packs in favour of celebrating our "curves" and calling ourselves "real girls" because we eat too much and don't like admitting it. 

We are "real girls" if we spend our days lounging around in no make up with unkempt hair watching trash TV, and our nights in dresses too small, kissing spotty teenage boys. "Real" if we eat kebabs, label skinny girls as sluts and develop a kind of strange arrogance that demands that people respect us for being somehow more "real" than somebody else. But is "real" just a justification for lazy?

Is "real" just a smokescreen, a snake telling us what we want to hear so that we don't have to feel bad about ourselves? 

I don't believe that everybody deserves to be told that they are just as special as everybody else. What about a female athlete, who dedicated her teens, not to drinking alcopops and sleeping with boys, but to eating well, keeping fit and honing her skills in the hope of being the next gold medalist? Is she not "real?" Or the model, the woman who has spent her life keeping in shape and working tirelessly while all her friends are still in school to ensure that she achieves her dream before her shelf life runs out? 

Just because we can relate more to the losers of life, doesn't mean that we should take away our admiration for the winners. 

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not saying that being 7lbs overweight is something to be ashamed of, but I don't think that lovehandles and bingo wings are things to actively celebrate and be proud of. Neither am I insinuating that we mere mortals should spend our days crying over our reflections, but it does sadden me to see people who have worked so hard on their image or career being portrayed as somehow lesser than those people who spend their entire lives in a state of mediocrity. Why can we not strive to be more like them, aspiring to perfection rather than celebrating our flaws?

In today's society, we glorify the weak and punish the winners. 

The popular girls and boys are "stupid" and "slutty" while the outcasts make it cool to be awkward, or "random" and the like. It is seen as beautiful these days to be somehow imperfect, to have issues. Mental illness is glamorous, with thousands of Twitter accounts claiming to be insane, bipolar or psychotic as if these labels are just there to be claimed for the cool factor. Tumblr and Instagram are full of young people starving and cutting themselves, using each other's photographs as inspiration, all in some sort of twisted competition as to who can be the most screwed up. It is deemed somewhat cool to say that you suffer from insomnia or anxiety, and the amount of times that I've heard people who are mildly agitated claiming to be having a panic attack is laughable! 

I don't want to have to slit my wrists to be deemed interesting! I don't want to have to suffer from an eating disorder to gain thousands of Twitter followers! Why do the interesting accounts, the positive accounts waste their genius on 71 followers while the sick boys and girls of the Twittosphere are worshipped as gods?

Having self-harm scars and an eating disorder don't automatically make you "interesting." 

They don't make you "real." This culture that we have developed of not judging people for being average has gotten to the point where we are scared to acknowledge true beauty or true talent. I am not of the opinion that the boy with a deviated septum claiming dole money because he abandoned education for dubstep, is just as "special" as the one who worked hard and became a doctor, or travelled the world, or turned his body into a temple. 

If everybody is special than nobody is. 

And why does everybody need to be beautiful anyway? We can't all be beautiful and thin. Let's leave thinness to the models and stop trying to claim the title of "beautiful." Let's allow them to have their looks and be proud of something else about ourselves!

Maybe you've done a shed load of charity work and really made a difference in somebody's life. Maybe you're a brilliant academic and put top scholars to shame. Maybe you work three jobs just to get by and never complain about it. Maybe you should actually stand up and occasionally say that "YES, I am proud to be a male," instead of being scared of the feminist backlash, or "YES, I am proud to have huge boobs and a tiny waist," instead of being scared that someone, somewhere, will brand you a narcissistic slut just because they feel that they deserve to be confident and you don't. 

Let us celebrate the good things about ourselves and not the bad! 

Let us glorify the strong, the fit, the beautiful, the intelligent, the brave, the successful and the rich! 

Let winners be winners! 

Actually give yourself something positive to aspire to, so that maybe the next generation of teenagers won't want to be the girl famous on Tumblr for her anorexia, or the boys and girls that claim to be "nice guys" or "real girls" to make themselves feel better when the jock and the model are attracted to each other rather than to them. 

Don't celebrate your mediocrity.