After so many years of friendship, she ditched me for the “cooler” girls who were more “popular”. She was my other half, and we seemed to keep each other sane in the adventure they call high school.
How could I be so naïve?
The world we live in is full of fake lifestyles, fake people, and fake friendships, like a plastic world crammed with beautiful blonde Barbie’s who dictate the way we should look and act. Well I am sick of this world, who says I can’t be the real me? Why would my best friend pick plastic over authentic me? Of course this experience has only made me stronger and allows me to further expose my personality with pride, but where does that leave her? Will she fall out of this trance and realize she has been wasting her time letting others control her? This questioning leads me to ultimately ask: In a culture where media and other people tend to shape us, how do we define our character and allow our true self to shine? In fact, I wonder if this is possible in an age where media continues to expand and consume our lives.
Mean Girls, a humorous chick flick, reminds me of the nightmare media is turning our world into. Although the movie Mean Girls may seem a little far-fetched, high school sometimes appears to be a battlefield full of awfully mean girls trying to tear girls down and recruit others to their army of plastics. The film also portrays the girls who try to stay true to themselves and their friends, because they see right through the mean girls. This allows the movie to be even more authentic, and connect to the overall big question.
As for literature, the theme of defining character and allowing one’s true self to shine appears in many novels such as Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. In both novels, the main character ignores what the world expects of them and accepts their true identity and purpose.
So, let’s live by the insightful lyrics of pop sensation Kesha who sings, “We are who we are”. Accept yourself and instead of allowing the world to tell us who to be, let’s consider a world where we can be individuals.
