What’s your least favourite word? We’ve been talking about this and came up with the following…

Moist….

Orifice….

Methinks…..

Fab…..

Smeg……

The C-word, (you know yourself).

But if we had to choose one word to eradicate from the vocabulary of every teenage girl it would be this...

We girls put ourselves under huge pressure to be perfect; to have the perfect bodies, not just thin, but curvy in the right places. Trying to be smart and academic and to ace every exam we ever take. Having to always be wise, measured, serene, and never have a meltdown. To be everyone’s best friend, always available, always understanding. To be the perfect child, so agreeable, never sassy. We are supposed to have our lives figured out by the age of 18 and to proudly share our perfect Instagram lives with the world, and get 500 likes on each filtered, posed photograph.

Every single one of us will fail.

Every. Single. One.

Because no one is perfect. And no matter how hard we try we will never get there. Can’t we all just agree to do our best, and for that to be enough? Sometimes our best will be awesome. But sometimes, our best will involve barely hanging in there and taking life one step at a time. And that will be okay. Can we agree that every challenge and every failure is an opportunity to learn, so that the next time, we can do better? Why don’t we strive to be kind, to be resilient, to be hard-working, to be self-aware, to be a work in progress?

Ask any adult if they’ve figured life out yet, they will say no. At some stage in the future, you will realise that you can never have all the answers, but that you can accept and love yourself just as you are, and that’s enough. When your boobs are sagging, and you have to get up to pee 5 times a night, you will look back and wish that you’d been easier on yourself, given yourself a break, eaten that cake, and worn that bikini. And, if we may be so bold, you might even wonder why you don’t have one picture of yourself as a young woman when you weren’t doing duckface.

Do you really want to look like this?

TBH, she looks like she’s no craic at all, at all.

We will never look like the women in magazines, hell, even the women in magazines don’t look like the women in magazines. This video, made by Dove, shows just what’s involved in making the ideal cover girl. Who even has time for that?