Have you ever realized that no matter how many times someone will say “Be yourself” they still judge you when you do? Parents don’t realize that when they encourage their child to be themselves they are setting the children up for failure. In schools, no matter how long the time difference may be, it never changes; we are judged and bullied for being ourselves like we are told to. Words are thrown at us like weapons, cutting us down, ruining our self-esteem. We are called geeks, nerds, nobodies, weird, stupid, and freaks, sometimes even harsher words like b****, goth, fag, gay, anorexic, fat, s***, emo, and even worthless.

People always question us: us, the people struggling to be who we want to be, and the people who want more than anything to be ourselves, they ask us “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just be normal like everyone else?”…and we think ‘Normal? I was being normal, I was being MY normal. Society doesn’t actually mean YOURself, society wants us to be what THEY consider normal, what THEY consider to be ‘Socially acceptable’.