Late Night Thoughts: The Evaluation of a Photograph

My favorite part of moving is decorating, making my space my own. I am an avid poster and wall decoration lover. It is weird for me to not have things on my walls, making my space unique. So when I moved this week I started to unpack and hang things up, when I had an idea. I would take all of my favorite photographs that I have and make a memory wall.

This took a lot more work than I thought it would. Firstly, I started by going through all of my photographs and deciding which one's I want to hang up. This ended up being a very hard thing to do.

As I was looking through my life documented in photographs I slowly started to see a pattern. There is a time in everyone's life where they hate themselves, they hate how they look and they just hate. As I was going through my pictures I started to notice that my smile in a lot of my pictures were fake, forced smiles. It wasn't always like that, all of the pictures from my early childhood I was a happy, smiley, laughing kid. Then I got to a certain age when everything started to fade. My eyes didn't shine as brightly, my smile was no longer genuine. Then I noticed the most recent of the pictures. I was getting my light back. My smile was big and bright like it was when I was a kid, and it was all documented through photographs. 

I don't know why I started to fade away. Some people say it is just puberty and everyone goes through it. But at what point in your life do you look yourself in the mirror and think about all the things that are wrong with you. At what point do you start to doubt your mind and knowledge. At what point do you stop speaking because the fear of getting criticized is too much for you to handle.
Maybe it is because of puberty and the pressure to "fit in". But what is "fitting in" really? Isn't it just following what everyone else is doing so they don't ostracize you.
But what is the point? Why do we need to ostracize others because they are just doing what makes them happy. I've seen this happen mostly in the "preteen" and teenagers because the idea of being "popular" was more important than our own feelings/wants.
I only got my shine back when I found myself. I stopped thinking the same way as my peers and I finally accepted myself for myself.
The idea that this will happen to most preteen/teenagers is scary. We don't need to be ashamed of who we are, but we also shouldn't be afraid that by being ourselves we could get hurt. We shouldn't have to be as self-aware as we all are.
Maybe this is societies fault, maybe it is the medias fault. Except the point is that we are sitting here blaming each other for the way our society thinks/feels. We need to stand up. Stop the bullying. Stop the hate. We are all individuals with feelings and emotions. We are all human.