Recently I began talking openly on the Internet about how I grow out my armpit hair, and I received quite a lot of love for doing so. This surprised me, as my story surely wasn't the first of its kind, and my message was so simple that it felt almost trite. But evidently, these are things that girls still need to hear, still appreciate others expressing, so I'll say it again. Love yourself, do what you want with your body, other opinions are irrelevant.

Why are these such hard concepts for us women to grapple with? Because we have been subliminally taught the opposite of them for as long as we can remember. You have to be a certain size or you aren't pretty, you have to look and act a certain way or you're weird, you need certain qualities to be sexually valuable. This is society's chant. Maybe no one has directly told you these things, but we are forced to feel the weight of them every day. It takes conscious effort to be accepting of yourself when you break a social norm, even if it's one as little as not shaving your body hair to the expected degree. I know this because I'm experiencing it, but some will only ever know this through me telling them. Some girls will never have the courage or the outward desire to break the expectations the world has put on us, and I understand that. For their silence, I will speak.

I feel particularly lucky, because ever since I was a young girl I remember telling my mom, "I don't care what other people think." And it was true. My best friends were roly polies, and my fashion sense was anything but cute and frilly. I was a weird kid who grew into a weird adolescent and is now proudly on the cusp of weird adulthood. If someone said I dressed strange, or I should wear more make up, or I should act a certain way, my response has always fallen somewhere along the lines of "screw 'em." This doesn't mean I don't have issues with myself and my appearance, but they are issues stemming from my own critique, not others.

So for every girl who's too afraid of what others might think, or the embarrassment that can come with being your unapologetic self, I want to stand up for you. I know it's hard. People can, without thought, make a comment that ruins your entire day. I can brush those instances off better than most, so I want to do everything I can to inspire others to do the same. I will live my life consciously in support of the women who have been so beat down that they can't imagine standing tall. Who have lost their sense of identity in the whirlwind of expectations. I love you, I support you, and I believe in your value and capabilities. You are an incredibly unique, complex individual, and though it may be so terribly difficult, don't let anyone take that away from you.