You know what my worst nightmare is?

Jean shopping.

It’s the most frustrating. Being a woman with any sign of curves makes it hard to find pants that fit you right. The ones that fit your waist are too short, while the ones that are long enough are too tight or too loose. Companies can’t agree on whether to size women’s pants with even numbers or odd numbers. So, I have anywhere from a size 6 to a size 11 sitting in my jean drawer.

It leaves my head spinning that I feel thinner when I put on a size 6, and then without my body changing at all, I feel like something is wrong with me when I need to go up to a size 11. I know I’m not the only one who feels the pain of never being confident in what size you are when it comes to pants. And I believe that it’s a common struggle to tend to feel bad about yourself when you wear a bigger size than you thought you would.

Newsflash: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you.

It’s not your fault that the companies that make the pants all make them differently and no one can figure out a universal system that works across the board.

It’s not your fault that sometimes the companies can’t figure out how to make a pair of jeans that leaves room for your hips and your butt without being so long you must roll them up several times on the bottom.

None of it is your fault.

It’s silly to let a number like that define you because it changes so much.

Here’s another number that you shouldn’t look at as part of your identity – your weight.

Just like your pant size, your weight could vary within a given day. It will fluctuate within a couple pounds from the time you wake up and the end of the day. It will go up if you eat a big meal and go down if you use the bathroom, and if you’re a woman then your cycle affects it too.

Weight loss is really hard. You can be doing all the right things and feel good and the scale still might not reflect that. You might want to lose those last couple pounds to pass a certain threshold and you can’t seem to go any lower. You hover around the same weight, losing a pound and then gaining two back. It’s all a mental game.

And if you let the world tell you that the number on the scale holds so much weight (pun intended), then you’re letting the world win.

It’s impossible to feel good about yourself when all you can focus on are the numbers on the scale and on the tags of your clothes. It’s exhausting trying to keep up with standards in a superficial world.

Those numbers are not the parts that make up who you are.

They can’t define you in that way unless you let them.