And then came eyebrowgate. I posted a selfie, because internet, but also because the shot had accidentally captured my arms at an unnatural angle which made them appear far slimmer than they are. I wanted to prove @CarlyCurls01982 wrong! As I picked a filter, I imagined her commenting, “Oh wow, I shouldn’t have said your arms are fat! It was just an unflattering picture! I should have known! You post goofy shots all the time, because you’re adorkable, and confident, and sexy, and professional, and tough, and cute, and thin but not too thin, and curvy but not fat, and chesty but not like a porn star, and all of the other things a human woman should be!”

Well, @CarlyCurls01982 didn’t comment at all. In fact, no one said a thing about my borderline deformed-looking arms! Instead, the comments section devolved into a shouty, all-caps screaming match about my eyebrow “fleekness.” Before this debate, it had actually never dawned on me that my eyebrows were something about which I should be self-conscious. Sure, every few weeks, I pluck a few wandering strands from my vestigial unibrow, but I’ve certainly never stressed about them. I was almost offended that no one told me this was such an important thing to feel bad about! Had I been walking around for the last 26 years, bushy eyebrows first, totally unaware that the blistering, judge-y looks I imagined about my arms, were actually directed at my Grey Gardens-status eyebrows?

I clicked through to the profile of one of the most vocal women commenting on the photo. From the first picture on her account, I could see that she and all her friends favored razor-thin eyebrows, purposefully crafted into tiny lines, perched above their eyes. They thought it was beautiful, and it was! Not for me, but it was beautiful, because it gave them confidence. I realized that this girl wasn’t even trying to be hateful, she was genuinely trying to help me be more attractive, based on her personal standards of beauty. And that was really the key moment for me, the moment I had a two-part epiphany:

1. Not everyone is going to love me.

When you are in the spotlight, with 800,000 people reading your words and looking at your photos every day, you very quickly realize that there is literally nothing in the world you can share that everyone is going to respond positively to, and that is because people are just fundamentally different. Hey, if Malala has critics, my @CrazyJewishMom and I certainly will. This is something I learned, accepted, and embraced early on, posting our conversations on Instagram — a text from my mom that I find hilarious might not appeal to 95% of our followers. And this led to the second part of my epiphany.

2. Why do I care more when the criticism is directed at my body?

Why was I surprised that this same concept should apply to my appearance? And why on earth was I letting nasty comments about my eyebrows upset me more than people accusing my mom of being a child abuser, or the occasional white supremacist monster telling me to "go find a gas chamber"? Hitler enthusiasts aside, you can’t even please every sane person with a given post, so why was I trying to make my face and my body into a homogenized vanilla, palatable to a mass audience so diverse it didn’t even have one ideal to aim for?