If you ask any girl what she wants in a relationship, she’ll most likely describe positive attributes. While all relationships are different, every healthy relationship has common traits such as trust, love, compassion, acceptance, and the ability to work through problems. These relationships take time and effort to build so that everyone involved can be happy. There will be rough patches, but everything will smooth out in the end if you work at it, but for some reason we don’t we take the same attitude to our longest-lasting relationship-our relationship with ourselves.
Loving yourself is just as important, if not more so, than loving someone else. Embracing your flaws and accepting your little anomalies is the first step to being secure in yourself, and everyone has things about them that aren’t perfect. We all have little quirks, issues, and hang-ups that we’d like to fix, but if we’re willing to accept them in someone else, let’s do ourselves a favor and accept them in ourselves.
When was the last time that you looked into a mirror and didn’t wonder how different life would be if you had a smaller nose, a skinnier waistline, a bigger ass, or clearer skin?
People tell me that love has nothing to do with looks. We often fall in love with a person based their personality, and a person’s looks are less important than our compatibility with them. So why don’t we do that with ourselves? Why are we so quick to judge our own looks with harsh words and questions? When did it become such a challenge to love ourselves as unconditionally as we would someone we are in a relationship with? Why is it a struggle to compliment ourselves daily and find confidence in how we look and who we are? Why aren’t we proud to show ourselves off to the world, when we’re proud to show everyone who we are dating, and how incredible they are to us?
This has bothered me for a very long time. As women, especially with the influence of the media, a lot is expected of us. We are supposed to be skinny, blemish-free, confident, but humble about everything. Since when were we all supposed to be the same? When did: “Be unique” turn into: “Be unique… but not like that”? Why have we put aside everything that makes us who we are, to try and become what everyone else is?
For me, the first time I can remember actually looking into a mirror and not immediately cataloguing everything that I didn’t like about myself was only about six months ago. As a junior, I have had plenty of time in college to discover who I am. In the past six months, I’ve come to the startling realization that I had been trying to change myself just as much as I had in high school.
Instead of learning to love myself and becoming my own person, I had been hiding behind the idea that I had to change myself to fit everyone else’s standards and expectations. I had looked at all of the girls around me and had tried to blend in among them, content not to draw attention to myself on such a large campus.
How many times in the past month have you woken up and thought to yourself “I’m gorgeous and I’m going to do awesome things today!”? Now, how many times have you felt uncomfortable with how you looked in something, even if it’s one of your favorite pieces of clothing? Or you decide not to put on that lipstick that you adore because you’re afraid of what someone else on campus might say if they saw you wearing it. Right now, I want you to look into a mirror, and say to yourself “I am beautiful”. because I am absolutely certain it’s true.
You may not feel entirely confident in saying these words to yourself, but at the beginning of any truly beautiful relationship we all feel a bit nervous, don’t we? We all get a bit shy and worry about what’s going to happen once the person we’re interested in knows all of our dirty secrets. We’re embarrassed about our flaws which could freak out whomever we’re seeing. We don’t want to scare them away, so we cover them up and be someone else. Someone more polite, possibly quieter or more outgoing, or someone who wears makeup on a daily basis. We try to hide away the things that make us who we are, because we’re so concerned that our flaws are glaringly obvious to people around us.
But the truth is that they don’t see them. Every flaw that you see in yourself seems thousands of times bigger to you than to anyone else. Whether it’s as simple as a pimple that cropped up over night on your nose and you think it makes you look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or it’s something much deeper than that, it doesn’t matter. And if all women were able to love themselves, even with the flaws that they carry around everyday, what a different world we would live in.
Honestly, do you believe that even Beyonce doesn’t wake up feeling slightly less than flawless on occasion? And yet she still manages to be confident in everything that she does.
Learning to love yourself is one of the most difficult things you will do in your life. It’s not an overnight change of heart. There will be bad days, some where you just feel a little down and some when you can’t bear to look yourself in the mirror, but those are the days that should make you appreciate the good ones. Love everything about yourself, even the parts that you’re unsure of, because they are exactly what makes you who you are, and that is awesome.
College is a time where people are meant to figure out what they want in life. Who they’re looking for in a partner, what kind of career they want to pursue, and especially who they are as an individual. We have to find courage to be yourself without fear of what others will think. You should have a love for yourself that inspires other girls to start to love themselves in return.
So go ahead and look in that mirror. Look yourself straight in the eyes and tell yourself that you are beautiful, and are the best you that you can be. No one else has the ability to bring your presence to a room. No one else can voice your opinions, or fight your battles. And maybe someday someone will look at you and say to themselves “I wish I could be as happy with myself as she is.”
The moment you start to love and support yourself is the moment that you will start your way towards unconditional happiness. So step out into the world with positive thoughts and rock your flaws, because no one can pull them off as beautifully as you.