2+2=4. Their they’re and there sound similar but don’t mean the same thing. The world is descending into chaos. Those are common facts. Yet the phrase ‘you are beautiful and it is important you know this’ is often buried under our school education. Why must it be like that? Why is teaching self love not as important as knowing how to draw a hyperbola translated up 3 points and shifted down -5 points?

A little girl will cover herself in the summer’s heat to decrease the chances of darting eyes at the dark hair on her skin. She is gifted a razor for her 13th birthday. Her school system continues to teach her how to minus equations in the most effective way, but she still can’t erase her peer’s stares at the glistening hair on her upper lip. Grown, she will look at her naked body in the mirror, and label the white lightning bolts scattering down her thigh as an atrocity. She has never been taught to treasure her tiger marks, or to see them as anything else but deformities. Bio oil becomes her best friend in the hopes that it will remove her stretch marks. Society promised her it would. As she scrolls down her Instagram feed, her eyes will witness models depicted as being ‘body goals’. Her stare will go down to her stomach, where she will grab at her belly and imagine scissors cutting away at the excess skin. She knows she should love the skin she was born in, but it’s hard when there is a lack of media coverage of plus size women.
 
A man will cry, and be ridiculed for showing emotions. “Only girls cry.” is the popular belief. Why is that? Why must a man’s masculinity suddenly be endangered if he seen to have a heart? He is a human being. We all are. But no, men must set aside their gentler side and conform to society’s standards. Elsewhere, a boy will one day venture into his mother’s closet in secrecy, and remain trapped there. He notices the older boys in school sneering at him, pointing, whispering to each other. He knows he should ignore it, but it’s hard when he has no support, or anyone else telling him that it’s okay to be who he is, and love who he wants to.
 
So many years of education yet no one taught us how to love ourselves and why it’s important. Why should self love take a back seat to your typical schooling? All that the lack of attention to self love is giving us are eating disorders. Anxiety. Depression. Even death. The past, present and future generations of this world need to be able to look at themselves and think, ‘I am beautiful’. Most importantly, they need to believe it. Love and confidence have a domino effect. If one person can love themselves, so can the next. And the next. And the next.
 
Question is, how can we be that change in the world, when the moment we leave school, all we know is that they’re their and there sound similar but don’t mean the same thing? We were tutored how to draw too many types of graphs, and hated every moment of it. But still after so many years of education, we were never taught how to love ourselves. And I think every single one of us, alive or dead, would’ve really loved to know why it is so important.