You are not here to be pretty for them.

If you think you're not pretty, I need you to examine that thought for a moment.

Really sit with it.

Then ask yourself: Who told you that? Because I guarantee you didn't come out of the womb thinking that way. You weren't born questioning how your nose curves, your thighs touch, or the way your skin glows in the sunlight.

Somewhere along the line, this world taught you to doubt your own reflection. This world taught you to believe that your worth, your beauty, your value—everything you are—can be erased with a single comparison. And that's not your fault. But it is time to unlearn it.

Here's the truth: if you think you're not beautiful, you are 100% measuring yourself against a ruler designed to degrade your value. That ruler?

It's the male gaze.

It's white supremacy.

It's capitalism.

It's a cocktail of oppressive systems that were never meant to include you.

Never meant to celebrate you.

Never meant to honor the divine masterpiece that you are.

The male gaze is a lie. It's a marketing scheme designed by capitalism and pasted in place by beauty standards that center of whiteness.

It tells you that your value lies in how much you appeal to men, in whether you're "sexy" but not "too slutty,"

desirable but still "pure,"

easy to look at but never too bold.

It's a trap, built to keep you small, obedient, and always chasing approval. And let's be clear: that gaze doesn't love you. It doesn't even see you. It sees what it can take from you.

And then there's white supremacy, weaving its poison through every image, every ad, every movie, every magazine cover. Telling you that beauty looks one way: white, thin, Eurocentric, straight-haired, light-eyed. It values youth above all else, maybe to the point of finding girls the height of sexy. 

White supremacy teaches you to erase yourself, to strip away the things that make you you—your curls, your melanin, your fullness, your fire—until you're left with some hollowed-out version of yourself, chasing after a standard that doesn't even recognize your humanity.

That standard isn't neutral. It was built to keep power in the hands of a select few and to convince you to spend your whole life chasing their approval instead of realizing your own.

But let me say this as clearly as I can: you are not here to be pretty for them.

You are not here to be pretty for anyone.

You are not an ornament.

You are not a canvas for someone else's desire.

You are not a product to be consumed or judged or compared.

You are a force.

A whole, wild, vibrant force of nature.

You are alive.

You are real.

You are infinite. And no standard, no gaze, no system of oppression can take that from you.

Your beauty does not depend on whether or not someone else sees it. It does not live in their eyes. It lives in you—in the way your body carries you through this world, in the way you laugh, in the way you love, in the way you are unflinchingly, unapologetically yourself.

Beauty is not something you owe anyone. It is not something you earn by shrinking, by conforming, by chasing some impossible ideal. Your beauty is in your truth. In your power. In your refusal to play by their rules.

So, if you've ever looked in the mirror and thought, "I'm not pretty," I want you to look again. Not with their eyes, not with their lies, but with the full weight of your own lusciousness.

Look at everything they told you to hate—your curves, your stretch marks, your scars, your freckles, your hair, your skin, your fullness—and understand this: those are the parts of you they could never tame.

Those are the parts of you that refuse to fit into their boxes, the parts that remind you of your own sacred power. And that power? It's the most beautiful thing of all.

Let go of their rulers. Let go of their standards. Let go of the lie that you were ever anything less than radiant. You don't have to conform to their gaze. You don't have to bend to their expectations. You don't have to make yourself smaller to fit into their broken world.

You are not a reflection of their standards. You are a reflection of your own light. You are enough, just as you are. You always have been.