It’s summertime. Bikini season. It can be a make-or-break season.

All the other girls in your class are armed with their bikinis in a myriad of colors, and they have their perfect bodies with their perfect breasts and their perfect legs and their perfect skins.

But you. Well. You don’t look nearly as good as they do in a bikini (at least from your vantage point), and because of this, you feel uncomfortable baring so much of yourself in public.

It’s just that there is a standard. An unspoken understanding. If you don’t want to be ridiculed for being a prude or old-fashioned or ugly, you will have to wear one of those, too.

I see you shrinking in your own skin. I see how you take that shirt off and slip off those shorts in record time and immediately slide into the water. I see you, when it’s time to get out, covering up just as quickly as you can, even if it means soaking the only clothes you brought with you.

I see you watch the ones who strut around in their strings so confidently and wish you could be them.

Oh, yes. I used to be you.

My body wasn’t perfect according to all those unspoken standards, and there was nothing like summer to make me remember all the ways I couldn’t measure up.

There was nothing like watching all those other bikini-clad teenagers to make me realize I would probably never have what it takes.

We live in a different world than we did when I was 17. We live in a world of body-empowerment. There is all kind of talk about those girls without perfect bodies walking bravely around in bikinis and celebrating the different sizes and shapes of their bodies, but there is still an ideal, isn’t there? There is still an “us” and a “them,” and you don’t want to be a “them.”

In fact, you don’t really want to reveal whether you’re an “us” or a “them.” What you really want to do is cover up. But it’s summer, and it’s a swimsuit and there’s an expectation, and who are you to argue?

This is what it takes to fit in, you say.

Maybe it’s hard to see from your 17-year-old eyes right now, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: There never was much great about fitting in.

Much easier said on the other side of 17, I know.

I know what it’s like to be the odd one out, to be the only one who’s uncomfortable in her own skin, to be the only one without a perfect body while all those others look like a page straight out of a magazine.

I know how scary it is to try to defy convention.

We don’t think it looks like courage to cover up. We think courage looks like baring our bodies, because it’s much more frightening to peel off the over-shirt and stand proud with those bikinis covering only the tiniest outer pieces of us, isn’t it?

No. It isn’t. All it takes is a misguided connection between our bodies and who we are (“I am beautiful because of my perfect body”) to feel so comfortable with baring our bodies for the world to see, like it wants us to. That’s not courage.

Courage is covering up in a society that doesn’t think you should.

It’s not easy, when you’re young, to see the bigger picture. But there is a bigger picture (there always is), and it is this: Your body does not define who you are.

Let me say that again: YOUR BODY DOES NOT DEFINE WHO YOU ARE.

I know, I know. The magazines. The television shows. The ads. Even the body empowerment movement. All of it claims you will be able to find the perfect bikini (try this particular style for your shape!) for your perfect-as-is body (Even if you have a bigger-than-you’d-like belly, feel proud to wear this revealing piece of cloth that will teach you to view beauty in a better way!) and still feel comfortable in it (It doesn’t matter what you look like! We can make you look and feel great!).
All these messages can leave you feeling angry and disappointed and most of all unbeautiful.

Hear me, little sister: Some things weren’t meant to be shared (Like the shape of your breasts outside a triangle of cloth. Like whether you have a thigh gap like all the supermodels. Like whether your stomach jiggles at all when you walk.).

Sure, we’re asked to share those secrets freely every summer. We’re asked to uncover. We’re asked to leave little to the imagination—and that little becomes littler every year.

The world likes to tell us that our worth as women lies in our bodies—and in summertime that means how we look in a bikini.

It’s a lie, a deep-seated one that reaches it hands into a teenage society that says if you don’t uncover like all the others there must be something wrong with your body. Of course there must be. The girls with perfect bodies don’t have any problem baring themselves. They strut instead of shrinking. They bare openly and proudly. They could care less what people think.

And maybe it’s true. Maybe some of them enjoy the stares they get because of the way they look in a string bikini, but it’s because their worth has gotten all tangled up in how they look, and they need the reminder, too: Our bodies do not define us as women.

Our bodies are beautiful—no matter what their shape or size, but they are not who we are. They are only where we live for a time. They cannot tell us what we will do in the future. They do not control what happens to us. They cannot guarantee our success in anything of value (or they shouldn’t).

They do not tell us the whole story of beauty.

You don’t have to bare your body to be beautiful. A society like ours that sexualizes women at every turn doesn’t have to have the last word. It doesn’t have to tell us how to be beautiful.

Our beauty is not a cheap beauty that can be bought with a couple scraps of cloth. It’s not a beauty that says we can only claim it if we are seen through the eyes of sex and pleasure. This is not how we are taken seriously as women.

You don’t have to bare your body to be deemed worthy. You are worthy just because you are you. Believe it in your deepest parts.

And then turn the tide.

Change begins with you, little sister.

I know it’s the road less traveled for a teenage girl to say she’s not going to bare her body for all the world to see, and the road less traveled never promised easy, but nothing worth doing was ever easy.

You’ll learn that in time, too. Everything worthwhile takes work—relationships, career, covering up in a world that ask us to bare more and more outer pieces of ourselves.

Dare to defy “convention.” Dare to be different. Dare to cover up.

Dare to be a force of change.

You won’t ever regret it.