girl hate

If you see a beautiful girl walking down the street, your first thought is generally not an internal compliment, raving about her voluminous hair or natural waif-like figure. The thoughts swarming around in your head are more likely to be sharp jabs at the beautiful girls non-existant thigh fat, or imagined caterpillar eyebrows. We have all done this at least once in our life - we have all done it probably more than once this week - we may not be sure why at the time, but when we see someone superior to ourselves, we can’t seem to fight the urge to cut them down to size. Smaller than us, to be more exact.

Why is it that when a coworker gets praised for their new and innovative idea, we scoff and mention how they probably got the idea from someone else, instead of just giving them a pat on the back and a vocalized, “job well done!” Why when we see a gorgeous girl with a handsome man, we tell our friends that they’re probably just together because she has an easy reputation, instead of noting how adorable they are. Rather than call the sales attendant rude for getting us the dress in the next size up, why do we not thank her for her honesty, by telling us that the dress we picked out was too small for our hips?

We don’t all call World War Three to action every time someone intelligent or charming gets in our path, and it’s not like we haul out the missiles the second another person receives attention, but if you really take some time to analyze the little moments when other people upset us, you will realize that - whether we assert our disdain internally or externally - there is a pattern in our negative behavior: People are put off by others that exert superiority to them. Whether that predominance be measured in brain-power, sex-allure, beauty, charm, or kindness, it is all the same: If you assume someone is better than you in anyway, the claws are coming out.

Maybe there is some tie to our animal instincts. As a human race, we have evolved from cave men (and women) who spear bears to the - while sometimes questionable - civilized people that we are today. We have that natural, wild instinct. It is innate. So why let it go to waste? Instead of using our animalistic instincts to protect ourselves from wild beasts and keep safe shelter in our slabs of rock, we use them to defend ourselves from our new form of competition: the new girl in school, or the successful law firm down the road from your companies.

Maybe it stems from our wildly instincts, but there is something very naturally and ferociously independent about each of us, even if we have yet to realize it. Our bodies and minds want us to be self-fufilled, and in order for us to be the best that we can be, we must have self-confidence. We won’t get into why so few of us have a genuine confidence in ourselves - the list would go on for days - but many of us do not. In an attempt to fuel us to reach our full potential, we trick ourselves into a false confidence. How do we acquire this false self-confidence? We cut down others that we see as a potential threat. Not very nice, but it gets the job done. With each refueling of this temporary confidence, we allow ourselves to succeed in whatever task we are attempting to accomplish, whether that be writing a work proposal, getting ready for a date, or being charming and adorable while at a family dinner. It’s like a drug. Compare it to abusing adderall to complete your stacks of paperwork, or smoking a cigarette to ward off hunger and lose weight. In the end, we are only harming ourselves. Rather than hopping on a treadmill, or getting our work done in the daylight as opposed to procrastinating, we opt to take the easy way out. It takes much less energy and self-reflection to throw a hurtful name at a girl in a sexy dress, than genuinely believing that we look sexy in a dress of our own.

But abusing cigarettes and adderall will you kill you, eventually. Sure, the paperwork will be done and the weight will be off, but what will you have to show for it, knowing deep inside that your outcome did not come from your own work? Just the same, you will never love yourself so long as you don’t love others. Alternately, you will never love others until you love yourself. Put down the celebrity gossip magazine, and pick up a mirror. Pick up a paper from middle school with an A plus stamped on the front page. Tell yourself you are beautiful. Tell yourself you are intelligent. Ah - and well you’re at it - tell a stranger that today, as well. You’ll soon begin to realize that it’s a cycle. Treat others the way you’d like to be treated, as they say. Pay the positivity forward, and you’ll get it back. Wouldn’t you rather have a stranger approach you, telling you your hair looked nice, instead of noting your imaginary thigh fat?

- Teagan Laurel Alexander