Hold tight to yourself. No one else can.

How quickly we forget how much we are worth. So I am not "the brightest crayon the box" but I can admit that I am a smart girl. I have always studied hard in school and aced my tests and quizzes. However, I learned in the 8th grade that guys like "ditzy" girls. Woof.

Well since I did not exactly fit that mold I decided to make myself.

I began dumbing myself down to get a laugh out of a cute boy. I made stupid comments. I claimed I did not know that Montana was a state (now that a super star has rhymed my name with it there is no chance that I will ever forget it).  I asked dumb questions like "Can you tan in lightning?," in front of all my classmates. Everyone. All the time. I sat with the guys at lunch and they would drill me with questions pertaining to geography, politics and history. I got the answers wrong on purpose.

I will always remember a boy named Andrew who once approached me after lunch to say, "Some girls just pretend to be dumb. You really are dumb. That's cool." For a long time I held that "compliment" close to my heart.

Sure this insane dumbness got me attention, but not the kind of attention a girl should ever want. It made me less than I really was.

Halfway through high school, when I wanted to shake the ditz off of my self it was nearly impossible. I worked hard to make my self dumn, pretend to be dumb, so that guys would like me. Dumb.

We do this alot. We take ourselves and we criticize instead of praise, we find out faults instead of our best qualities. We tangle ourselves up in relationships and friendships that bring out the worst in us. We change and transform and morph into what we think will be more pleasing to the world. We let people step all over us and we convince ourselves that this is ok.

Well its not really. It is never really fine when we start forgetting how beautiful we are as individuals and how unique each one of us is. We want to be like other people, like celebrities and magazine covers. We aim to wipe out anything that sets us apart from society. We forget that all these crazy qualities that we have been given are a blessing rather than a burden. We let the media and society whisper in our ear at the end of the day. Our heart softly saying, "You are perfect just the way you are," is hushed almost instantly by society yelling "BE MORE! DO BETTER! BE SKINNIER! WORK HARDER."

It is not an easy task to stop listening to what the world is telling us and start focusing on what we really want for ourselves. I am trying to master this every single day and I wake up still seeing the obstacles in my way. The covers of magazines. The TV shows. The billboards. It is not easy to tune it all out but we can either let it roll off our shoulders or let it kill us slowly and softly. I opt for letting it roll.

SARK, if you have not heard of her then Google her. She is an amazing author with a kind and creative spirit. Her books have taught me to find my own forms of self love and harvest them on a daily basis. Today I use one of her quotes as a mantra to myself. Whenever days get tough, whenever I start to believe I am not enough I repeat her words in my head: You have enough, you do enough, you are enough.

And oh yea, now a senior in college, I have finally and officially shaken off the ditzy side of my personality. It is so much cooler to be  the smart girl Turns out, guys will proably like you even more if you know that Montana is a state.