Before she got a taste of country music success as part of the country duo Steel Magnolia, Meghan Linsey was just a 15-year-old kid with a dream. In an Instagram post on Monday (July 9), Linsey reminisces about what she remembers as painful days spent trying to make that dream come true.

"This was before filters and facetune and contour," Linsey wrote alongside a throwback picture of herself as a teen, performing at a festival. "This girl is on stage singing to several hundred people, yet she is so insecure and sad. She’s obsessed about her weight constantly (like, I really thought I was overweight in this picture.) and cries herself to sleep almost every night, because girls at school are so mean."

Linsey wonders how kids today handle that sort of pressure, with the existence of social media and close access to peers: "I just know that we all need to show a little more love and compassion," she says.

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The country singer received major backlash last year when she kneeled after singing the National Anthem at a football game. "Adults have to stop tearing each other down on social media and then wonder [sic] why bullying in schools and suicide rates in teenagers are so high. We have to lead by example," she insists.

After her Steel Magnolia days wrapped, Linsey tried out for The Voice in 2015 and ultimately came in second place. She has seemingly been in a reflective mood as of late, proclaiming confidence in herself in another recent Instagram post. "I struggled with believing this for a long time,” she writes with a meme that reads, "I Am Enough." "Stop living in the past and realize how far you’ve come. You are not the things that have happened to you."

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