I’m tired of scrolling through Tumblr pages where beautiful girls are complaining about being too fat, too ugly, too insecure, too scared etc etc etc… It tires my brain and it takes me to a place darker than the underside of that photocopier that was in our library at school, from which I once ate a fluffy polo I found under there because of a dare; a place where my own insecurities run rife like a fresher at a student bar with their loan just in and a superficial sense of wealth and prosperity.
In between these posts of growing anxiety and the implication of being unsure of quite why you think anyone would dare to love you despite your incessant need to post chronological pictures of yourself with a growing inverted muffin top, and your obvious desire for constant paparazzi style attention, are famous quotations that insinuate that one should ‘be oneself’ and love oneself for it. I don’t want to be overly critical here because we’re all a little down sometimes, but I can’t help but feel that these two ideas aren’t exactly compatible with each other.
A long time ago I wrote a blog about the growing obsession with self image and fear of not being the typical idea of beauty and the more I look around me, the more I see people hating on themselves. In between the stepping stone leaps from fad diet book to fad diet book with rivers of cake in between, people are dipping themselves in crude oil-like liquid and being lured in by adverts claiming to sell creams made from the tears of unicorns slain at the beak of starved phoenixes, and fresh minerals hand picked from the underside of stones found in caves once inhabited by elves. And I can’t help but think…seriously? Are you serious?
I think about my bikini body when I’m frolicking on a beach in Thailand. I think about Backfat Betty creeping over the perhaps too tight waistband of my insy winsy polka dot bikini and all I think is…WHO CARES?! I’M GOING TO BE ON A BEACH IN THAILAND.
Wake up, because here are the facts right here. I’m not going to tell you that you’re beautiful and neither will anybody else because the world is cruel and cold and unkind. And besides, perhaps one could say that compliments are wasted on people with such low self-esteem that the mirror in your bedroom would, by your own estimates, be more fit for a Funhouse. I’m not going to tell you that only when you realise your true beauty will you be happy…I won’t tell you any of those things, but I will tell you this:
Beauty is a a little like the old time classic musical ‘Grease’. Beauty is the time, is the place, is the moment. Beauty is the way we are feeling.
Beauty is when I’m sun-drenched, prancing around that beach in my tiny flap of water friendly material, splashing warm exotic sea-water on my beautifully worldly boyfriend and forcing him to bury his toes in the sand with mine. Beauty is when I have a jumper slung over my shoulders while I sit around a fire with my new found friends and talk over where we’ve come from and where the hell we hope we’ll one day end up.
It’s only when you stop looking to others to tell you that you’re beautiful enough or skinny enough, or picture perfect enough, and when you stop posting pictures of third parties who make no difference to your life, to try ascertain what’s expected of you, that you’ll stop and see that beauty is all around, with the potential of consuming you if you’d only take a breath and feel it. So just stop thinking about how hard life is on you and your appearance for a second and see how it actually shines on you. It’s in those glorious moments that you’ll feel beautiful.
More than beautiful, you’ll feel infinite.
