G I R L P O W E R

When I was in high school I found a video, unfortunately that somebody posted of me, labeling me the world’s ugliest woman. There were four million views to this video, eight seconds long, no sound, thousands of comments. People saying, Lizzie, please, please just a do the world of favor, put a gun to your head and kill yourself.

Think, think about that. If people did – if people told you that, strangers told you this. I cried in my eyes out of course and I was ready to kind of fight back and something kind of clicked in my head and I thought, I’m just going to leave it alone. I kind of started realizing that my life is in my hands. I could either choose to make this really good or I can choose to make this really bad. I could either be grateful and open my eyes and realize the things that I do have and make those the things that define me. I can’t see out of one eye, but I can see out of the other. I might get sick a lot, but I have really nice hair.

Okay, so I could either choose to be happier, I could choose to kind of be upset with what I have and still kind of complain about it. But then I started realizing, am I going to let the people who called me a monster, define me? Am I going to let the people who said, kill it with fire, define me? 

No. I’m going to let my goals and my success and my accomplishments be the things that define me, not my outer appearance, not the fact that I’m visually impaired, not the fact that have this syndrome that nobody knows what it is.

So I told myself I’m going work my butt off and do whatever I could to I make myself better, because in my mind, the best way that I could get back at all those people who made fun of me, who teased me, who called me ugly, who called me a monster, was to make myself better and to show them you know what, tell those negative things, I’m going to turn them around and I’m going to use them as a ladder to climb up to my goals. That’s what I did.