Relationships can teach you how to fall in love with yourself. They provide someone else’s perspective as a lens to view yourself in ways that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Once you lose that relationship, it causes you to lose that confidence because the person who once reassured you, is no longer there. This became difficult for me, as the pressure that I placed on my relationship had derived from my deeper insecurities to begin with.
So many female celebrities get hate from other women for similarly arbitrary reasons, and it all comes from internalized misogyny. It is time to stop this ugly behavior of women tearing down other women and leave it behind in middle school.
Authority figures, mainstream culture and the patriarchy — in no particular order — all taught me the same sentiment: as a woman, it is not my place to know my own self-worth.
When I was 16, I asked the same girl on a date four Friday afternoons in a row. I’d spend the whole week psyching myself up, thinking about what I’d say, how I’d say it and what measures I’d take...
