It feels weird going on tumblr. I spent years screen shotting images of “beauty” I thought I wanted. What was I really looking at? The image of fun? The image of health? The image of success? The image of creativity? Love? Happiness? Hope?
All they are, are images. I spent majority of my teenage years wishing I could be one of these images I spent hours reblogging. I wanted to be an image. Only now when I see myself here… In this photo… With hundreds of thousands of reblogs and even more followers… I see how absurd it is.
We are not images. I was not happy in this photo. I had foundation covering my acne. It was early 2014. I had no real friends. No real love. I was not happy.
Maybe I am happy now. I have love. I have success, to some degree. But this “success” is not what I want. I want so much more. I want to actually do something real. Real with my life. I am not just some false image.
If you are reading this now, wanting to be a girl in a photo that represents society’s current twisted idea of beauty… It’s not real. These are images. Manipulated. Edited. Filtered. They aren’t real. They are images. You are not an image. You are real.
We know they are just images. Yet we continue to aspire to them. To images. That’s all they are.
07/01/15 12.09am thoughts
Essena O'Neill Archive 