You wake up, roll out of bed, jump into the shower, get dressed, brush your hair, and then you look. You look into that mirror of yours, and you’re just not happy. You look at your hips, and how wide they are. You look at your stomach and think about how much you wish you could just take a vacuum cleaner to it and make it disappear, just like the crumbs on your floor. You look at your thighs and you roll your eyes. You give off a big sigh and grab your things, and head out the door. Trying to go about your day, with the demons in your head yelling at you, screaming at you that you're not good enough.
You're beyond good enough.
In my early years of life, I struggled deeply with body image. If I didn't like one thing about myself, then everything was terrible and awful and I was disgusting. Most of my middle school years, and the very beginning of high school, I struggled with who I was and had virtually no confidence.
My sophomore year of high school, I sat in a seminar that we had at school that spoke about image. The speaker talked about body image, and other image issues surrounding that. I remember the speaker said one thing, that hit me and affected me so deeply that I decided I was going to change how I viewed myself. The speaker said, "We are all made differently and that's a beautiful thing. It is not your job to try to tirelessly live up to 'standards' set by god knows who, it is your job to love and take of yourself for you."
When I heard those words said, I looked around me. I looked at all the different people that were in the room, some skinny, some larger: some in the middle, and some extreme versions of each.
When I started to think about other people, I thought, "Wow, they all probably wake up in the morning and hate something about themselves too."
Day by day, it got easier for me to accept myself, and my body and everything else about my image. I started to take care of myself, in a way that was unknown to me for so many years. When I looked in the mirror the list of things that I wanted to physically remove from myself, became smaller and smaller and smaller, until the list itself disappeared.
I guess what I'm trying to say with my story is that the moment we begin to accept ourselves for our wide hips or our tiny legs, we start to experience confidence like never before. Take a minute today, to look in the mirror and tell yourself that even though a certain part of your body isn't your favorite- it's you. You are unique. You are you. And you are allowed to love yourself and truly believe that you are the best.
Be the change. Become #BodyPositive today, and end the stigma that we have to form ourselves to fit into society's "body standards."
