Is Pretty Privilege Real?

During one highschool year I saw the most beautiful girl ever. I knew her the year before she went to my highschool. Back then, she looked nothing like she did now. She used to be overweight, with long blonde messy hair, and pimples all over her face. She liked to dress exactly like a boy, with her skinny jeans sagging, and hoodies obviously from the boys section. I never saw her with any friends but I never saw her in general. We only had one class together in a school full of two-thousand other kids around the campus. She laid her head down on the desk every time we had class. She never talked to anyone in that class. Over the summer she had completely changed herself to an opposite version. She had lost so much weight that she was hard to recognize at first. I saw her walking through my highschool and all I could recognize was her face, barely. She changed her brown eyes into blue with contacts. She had a face full of makeup on over top of her hidden pimples. She wore fake eyelashes that took up most of her small face. She wore a small shirt on her small body. Shorts over her now thigh gap. She had become beautiful in my eyes. I wanted to look exactly like her, because I looked the complete opposite.

In that one year she went to high school, she had recreated herself. I didn’t know alot about her because she never talked to me. Her friend talked to me one time and she didn’t ever look at me. She kept talking to her friend while her friend was trying to talk to me. I know sometime in the beginning of the year she had gotten a boyfriend. I saw her walk past me in the hallway with hickeys on her neck. One time she sat next to me on the bus and I saw her staring past me and smiling. There was a blonde boy she was staring at, who was standing by the bus for her. She had made friends with a huge group of seniors. She now had two bestfriends, a boyfriend, and many friends. I couldn’t believe it, how beautiful and lucky she had gotten.

She had gone from having nothing, and being no one to anyone, to becoming popular. I realized that she had worked to make herself beautiful. Before, when she didn’t try at all, nobody liked her. She didn’t do her makeup, straighten her hair, or dress up feminine. Now that she did, she would get stared at by boys. She would be sitting in class staring at her phone, and I would see boys staring at her when she wasn’t looking. She would walk out of the room and I would catch boys staring at her body. She had made the life for herself that every girl had dreamed of. She was able to make all of these relationships and get all of these stares because of her looks. She was the girl who was able to change my view of life. I’d think, if I get pretty like her, I can finally be someone people want to talk to. In that school, I was nothing but nice to everyone who ever talked to me. But nobody stuck around with me. I was the girl they would talk to while their friends were absent. Then when their friends came back, I was invisible to them.

This isn’t so much a writing of jelousy, but of realization because of her. It can be no coincidence that she had been bigger, masculine, and messy, without friends. Then to be smaller, feminine, and beautiful with many friends. I thank her for the motivation she had given me to lose weight and dress beautifully. Although, I still can’t help but see the majority of the world as mean because of this. Some will judge based off of looks and not of who the person really is.