When I was a little girl, I imagined when I grew up, I would be just like Barbie, with a fast car, fun friends, a hunky man, and let us not forget, a twelve-story high dream-house. As I grew up, from six to nine to eleven to today, I slowly learned life is not plastic. Life is not aimlessly wandering through town, trying on outfits at every whim. Life involves poverty and war and illness and death, courage and faith and a beauty that exists outside of Photoshop.


When I turn on the television and see another woman with jutting collarbones and a visible ribcage, it brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from John Green’s book, Looking for Alaska: "They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting." One may see this quote just as it is, but I see it as more. I see it as an explanation for the center of the media, what gets the most attention from the majority of us: malnourished women strutting in their high heels. The pressure we all have to be the same, to be tall, to be skinny, to be perfect, doesn’t work for me and it shouldn’t be what we strive towards. That is why, when I grow up, I want to find a cure for cancer, for diabetes. I want to save the whales. I want to give children a meal, three times a day. I want to end the war. I want people to stop discriminating, to let go of their prejudices. I want to be an exemplary role model. I want people to see there is more than worrying about whether their make-up is smudged, whether their hair is frizzy, whether people think badly of them.


One day, I will be on television screens, and I will not be walking the runway, I will not be acting, I will not be singing, I will not be dancing. I will be accepting a Nobel Prize for Peace, because I am going to change the world, I am going to make the Earth a cleaner, healthier place. I am going to be the reason little girls everywhere will throw down their Barbies and say, “I want to change the world, just like her!”