Am I pretty? Why does it feel like loving yourself is a rite of passage, something that is achieved? After all of the I’ve been through this, been treated like this, looked like this, acted like this… comes the I’ve learned to love myself unconditionally. Are we even meant to love ourselves? Well, what I’ve learned, is that self-love is the ultimate superpower.
Am I Pretty?
Why haven’t we been taught to love ourselves through it all, from the beginning? Our uniqueness should be celebrated; it represents so much more than our appearance. But instead, we’re asking questions like “am I beautiful?” and “how pretty am I?”. Society isn’t really set up to promote self-love, especially for women.
For so many, the desire to love oneself is buried under the sightless drive to society’s crowned ideal and its acceptance when reached. But if you become a version of yourself you don’t recognize, and the acceptance you’re receiving is from those your true self wants no part of, then what is all of it for? Why do we get so lost in it? This “love” society dishes out to those who reach a certain appearance is plastic. It can leave a person even emptier than they became on the journey that brought them there. A shell of themselves.
Is it Me?
The individual is not to blame, however. It is a broken system running off of broken conceptions of beauty and ideals and has left so many lost on this hamster wheel of validation. The medians that have allowed mass images of fake representations of humans into our daily consumption have skewed the natural processing our brain is programmed for. Before phones and magazines and patriarchy, there was no reason to think that we had to change what we looked like for love.
Loving ourselves for who we are, showing up as these authentic versions. Living a life unapologetic to our dreams will return nothing but genuineness back to us. The conception of authentic energy you put out into the world makes this possible. If we are living a life of service to a plastic mold, then the things that come into our lives are littered with doubt, mistrust, hatred, and bewilderment.
Your Unique Ancestry
The version of ourselves that was chosen for this planet carries the legacies, memories, sacrifices, and love of our bloodline into our very person, our appearance is a collection of all the things that make us who we are that no one else can replicate or take from us. That is something to let sink in. We are a collection of our entire ancestry. My eyes are the same as my mom’s and her dad’s and his brother’s. My lips are the same as my grandma’s and maybe even her grandma’s. Changing these things about ourselves takes away these gifts that connect us to our heritage. This is what we need to find value in. Everything about who you are was passed on through the love of the generations before you.
A Broken Society
Those that we see on magazines and Instagram represent an ideal that a frightened society has agreed to shelter under, determined to find comfort in conformity. This leads young girls who don’t even know themselves yet to ask, “Am I pretty?” and seek the answer in validation. Having a visual goal for what someone should morph their appearance into is so incredibly harmful. And what for? It is scary, when living in a society like ours, to step into the world fearlessly as our unique person. Boldness always reaps rewards. Sometimes, when we’re scared to do something, but our gut is telling us to do it, we just have to do it scared.
Society should celebrate the uniqueness of the individual. We were put on this earth to discover our unique paths. Part of that path may involve getting lost in this way at some point. It should never steer us permanently from our inner voice and the soul connections we are worthy of attracting in this journey. So, to you, what about you makes you beautiful? The world, and most importantly, yourself, need to see you shine.
