In the time where many teenage girls watched some of their celebrity crushes openly bash and describe the things they want a girl to do in order to impress them, I'm finally proud that one girl, one amazingly beautiful girl named Lizzie Velasquez decided to speak on.
Lizzie was born with an extremely rare disorder that only 3 known people in the world have. This disorder would also steal her eyesight and cause her to not gain any weight, regardless of what she eats or the amount of food she eats. Although Lizzie herself considers this a perk and looks on the brighter side of life, many people in her past took this as a way to bully her.
In her TEDx talk, she spoke on how she never realized how she was different looking until she got into kindergarten and many of the children openly didn't want to be near her. She carried on in life despising her looks and wanted nothing more than to get rid of this disorder that was causing people to look at her differently. Then, she saw a video of herself that a classmate of hers posted on YouTube stating that she was the "World's Ugliest Woman" and she cried for days. But even though the video was intended to bring her down, Lizzie didn't react. In fact, she took the negativity to bring herself up to show the people who were being rude that she could do the exact same things they did, regardless of her outer looks.
Years later, Lizzie graduated college, continued with her hopes of being a motivational speaker, and proved to women and men everywhere that looks don't define you, but what your mentality is like does.
Thank you to Charly Cox on the JacksGap site for writing a post about Lizzie. Watching the video meant a lot to me and it helped me see life differently.
-Emilee
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