Mirror
It’s horrible how conditioned young women are to hate themselves.
I was fortunate enough to grow up with a supportive family and amazing friends, and yet I still harbour this monster inside me who has a list a mile wide of things I should hate about myself.
Even know, I find myself thinking – if EmsCharityKiss were to work out, I would have to starve myself because I would hate for Robert Pattinson to see me as I am now. How awful is that? To completely negate the effort it took to get such a wonderful project off the ground, to negate the catharsis of sharing a lifetimes worth of struggle, just because the number on my jeans seems to somehow make me a lesser person in the eyes of society.
I’m more sensitive to this now, because I have a beautiful 10 month-old niece. I never want her to grow up thinking that her body is her enemy. I want her to see it as a house for her heart and her mind, a beautiful machine that lets her think and feel and act and live. Not a prison, not a nemesis. Not a means of holding her back from everything she dreams of.
Where do we lose that ability to find wonderment in everything, ourselves included?
Have you read Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth Megan? It touches on all of this and is an amazing read x
I really appreciate the honesty of your words here. It certainly can be hard to love and appreciate ourselves when we live in a world that constantly tries to tell us we need to be thinner, hotter, brighter, whiter – whatever! – to be lovable and acceptable.
It’s all a lie of course and so we need to make our own voice the loudest. Be positive and strong. You ARE beautiful and you ARE enough. Always.
Its drilled into our heads that being beautiful means we have to be perfect. When we’re little, we play with Barbie dolls. We watch cute little Disney movies where all the lead women are skinny and perfect. It happens to us before we even realize it.
I doubt any woman is above it. They either hate something about themselves or judge others by an unrealistic standard. I hate that I do hate things about myself, but I’m glad that I only put those standards on myself. I value others for the inside, for the things that matter.