You’ve got a unibrow. Your teeth are too yellow. Your boobs aren’t perky enough. You’re fat. Your forearms are disproportionately small and your thighs are too big and you’ve got weird stretch marks and toe hair and you should probably get contacts. Wait, no, now that I’ve seen you without them, I have to say you really have a face for glasses.

And these are just the things people have said to me. I haven’t had to hear about cankles or bat wings or front butt, nipple hair, cross-eyes, jug ears, turkey neck, muffin top, fivehead, buckteeth, snaggleteeth, bug eyes or pizza face. I could keep going, but this is a newspaper and I don’t have 500 pages to write the great American novel about mean shit people say.

My shoulders may be bony and my hands may be excessively sweaty most of the time, but I’m still a human being, and so are you. So are all of us. People with hunchbacks and bow-legged walks are still people. So why don’t we all treat each other like it? Why do we insist on picking apart the appearances of even the most conventionally attractive people? Sarah Jessica Parker has a horse face. Hillary Swank looks like a man. Queen Latifah is too big and Sandra Oh’s face is oddly oval.

We, as a society, have a problem. It’s time we all admitted it. We’re all guilty of it. The most beautiful and the least have all said something cruel about someone else’s appearance at some point in their lives, whether they said it to their face or behind their back.

We do it to fit in, we do it to feel better about ourselves, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t work. As long as we keep putting other people down for things they can’t help, we’ll never be happy.