As a teenager, especially with a myriad of emotional and identity issues, it’s kind of hard to just exist.

But honestly, we aren’t always our own enemies—sometimes, our friends and family feed into what makes us feel worse about ourselves.

My whole life, I’ve been monolingual. Even with several cultures and languages, from Spanish to Ga to Arabic, not one language besides English has stuck.

And my whole life, I’ve been laughed at for it. Not that this is something serious, but I didn’t think it mattered until I started to feel out of place because I can’t hold a conversation that my relatives could breeze through.

Then there are my bodily features. I’ve never been considered ugly (and probably never will be), but as someone who grew up with a toe defect and bumps down the bridge of my nose, I was always faced with comments on them as though they were something wrong.

My toe overlaps and stunts the growth of the last two. Why does that matter? And why is it a topic of conversation?

Winter guard is almost completely barefoot unless you have sole-less dance shoes, so getting multiple comments about it towards the start of the season heavily influenced my purchase of Capezio Pointe Ballet shoes in January. It’s not something I think about regularly, but everyone feels the need to give their input about what can be ‘fixed’ about me.

The pitch of my voice that drove me crazy in middle school because several people said it was insanely high—as if being a twelve year old girl with a high voice they’ve had their whole life is abnormal—and to this day, I obsessively listen to myself speaking on video to analyze my speech patterns to ‘regulate’ my tone, pitch and diction.

It is so easy to feel insecure about things that I can change, which overwhelms me as is, so three million birds chirping over my shoulder about things that are natural drive me up a wall.

From fat-shaming to comments about my skin tone, the list goes on. And I’m sick of it.

Why have we created and reinforced the narrative that there is always something wrong about us?

Of course nobody’s perfect: but why not be imperfect in silence?