Body Image: The Ugly Duckling?

The following is a guest post I wrote for Melanie Spring's blog.

Look at this girl with huge, frizzy hair, oversized glasses, and that special, awkward grin only adolescence and a mouthful of braces can bring. That was me in junior high - the typical, awkward teen.

Astonishingly, I didn't get a lot of dates then. I wasn't one of the "pretty-pretties" - the popular girls, the cheerleaders. In retrospect my body was pretty amazing - I was a dancer, and didn't surpass 110 pounds until high school - but I hated that I was built like a Skipper doll, with no boobs and no hips. My skin was pale to the point where my mom begged me to wear blush so I "wouldn't look dead."

But one day in my mid-teens I was reflecting on the story of the ugly duckling, and made a decision to put mind over matter. I was going to tell myself that I was the most gorgeous, fascinating thing that walked the earth, and my own positivity would attract others and make me "date-able."

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