If I was just okay with who I am and what I look like…
Today I feel as if there is this pressure to look good, feel good and be good, but what the hell does that mean “GOOD”? How do you know you are good? What the hell does ‘look good’ mean? I’ve always struggled with this whole standard, whether it be beauty, professional you name it. It reminds me of what I taught as a Special Education Teacher for social, emotional goals, hidden rules the holy grail of society. These rules that someone along the way decided that this was the way it needed to be. Hidden rules are all around us whether we know it or not, some of us know them like NOT masturbating on an airplane… LOL if you get the reference you are welcome if not, let’s hang out for a movie night.
As I was researching and learning on how to teach my students about ‘hidden rules,’ I had to think about examples of hidden rules in society, and it led me to think about all the hidden rules that I encounter on my day to day life. Now being skinny or rich are not ‘hidden rules’ I’d teach my students about, but they are ones as they grow up, hell what am I saying they’ll encounter it as soon as they are old enough to start comprehending the environment around them. This quiet ( well pretty LOUD just in other forms) standard that we as a society have decided we need to achieve started to take over every part of my thought process and who I was. Something I still struggle with.
As a little girl, I was always reading the newest magazine where I would look at the woman on the cover and think I hope I am like her one day, skinny, beautiful, perfect skin, even though you know, they are airbrushed and photoshopped. I would then look in the mirror, and I wouldn’t see that person looking back. I had terrible acne, braces you know the typically awkward puberty age where you look like someone who is changing because you are. I hated what I saw, I remember saying to myself in the mirror, if I just had clear skin, I would be beautiful, or if I only had straighter teeth, I would be prettier. The list would go on and on.
Fast forward ten years and my skin had cleared, and my teeth were straight, but I didn’t look any prettier, or at least I didn’t think so on the inside. I still found myself looking in the mirror saying things like if I just had skinnier arms, I would be happy or if I only had legs with a gap, etc. etc. Somewhere along the way those ‘hidden rules’ conditioned me to find a flaw and fix it to make me “feel good” about myself.
Now I know I am not alone on this, and there are many women out there, heck even men out there who look in the mirror and don’t like what they see back. I hear it all the time with people I am close with, ugh I have the biggest thighs, or my hips are huge, it’s like the scene from Mean Girls when they all are complaining about things they want to change. I find myself thinking why? YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, I’d kill for your insert anybody part I hate, but just like others tell me the same I roll my eyes and think yeah yeah you have to say it because it is polite. No amount of compliments will change your mind because it is not how you feel about how you about yourself.
My journey with this has been one of a roller coaster. About two years ago, I lost about 25 lbs. I remember waking up and looking in the mirror, my clothes weren’t fitting, and I was like OMG it happened, I am skinny YASSS. I was so excited I would tell my self- FINALLY you’ve got it! Thin, clear skin straight teeth, but it was all about a 2-week honeymoon period until I started obsessing about it and the thought would hit: if I was just… and the cycle began again.
I found myself so scared to gain all the weight back that all I could think about was how not to gain it back. I weighed myself each night before bed to make sure the scale stayed the same or even went down. I would tell myself not to eat a big breakfast in the morning or skip it and eat lunch the next day if it went up even a pound. My mind would always be thinking about how my clothes were fitting, were my jeans a little too snug, did my arms fit in the sleeves correctly. It was becoming my only thoughts. I would walk into the bedroom and ask “do I still look skinny” to my boyfriend and his words were always yes, but deep down inside of my something never believed him.
I continued to obsess and obsesses thinking; you can’t be fat again so skip the meal, eat a little bit less. As I got skinnier, people would ask if I was okay or tell me I look too thin. A part of me would hate it, but a big part of me loved it. Those statements to me meant that people thought I was skinny and to me, that was it all, I had made it but needed to stay there. If I gained it back, I’d be ugly- even though on the inside that is exactly what I felt even at my “skinniest.”
Looking at it now, it sounds terrible, it was awful. My routine and thoughts were my life for about a year. After the summer came and went, with enough conversations about it with friends and boyfriend (now Fiance) something changed in me. I knew what I was doing was a slippery slope to something even more consuming than it already was. I can’t tell you what exactly changed or what my wake-up call was, but I did get rid of the one thing I started to obsess over, and that was the number I saw on the scale. I had to tell my self the number isn’t the definition of beauty. Over time as the scale was gone, I find my mind wandering to I am now? Would it be the same would it be different? I couldn’t tell you; I have not stepped on a scale in about two years now. I still think about it often and find myself falling back into that cycle, but I try to tell myself that it is not worth how I felt about myself that whole year. It was/is a long process of me being okay with myself- checks out my blog post______ to read more about that. I do know that the outside won’t change my thoughts; I need to work from the inside out. I need to be okay with what I see and tell myself that I am good enough- whatever that means to me, not to everyone else or what I see on social media, again those ‘hidden rules.’
I have slowly started to get myself to the place in which I am okay with who I am and the way that I look, but I still have days where the thoughts overcome my mind. Today, I have started to love who I am, and all the flaws that I SEE. Somethings that I have focused on are feeling good, mentally and physically. I started eating healthy, and joining a gym where women empower each other to do/be their best. Now I am not the girl who rubs it in your face- I may share a workout here and there because you know if it’s not on insta did ya do it? (HIDDEN RULE) It has taken me a long time to take steps to change my habits to feel good about myself, it has been hard, but I finally feel like it is a step in the right direction. The working out hasn’t become something I do to lose weight, but instead, I have found that after I workout I feel better about myself, that I can do something that makes me happy, body and mind.
Physically changing isn’t hard; it is mental that is hard. To help myself with that I have started telling myself three things I LOVE about myself physically and non-physical, in the morning as I am getting ready. Each day I say them the more that I start actually to believe it. In the beginning, it felt so forced and fake, but as I say to teachers, I work with, “FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT” and let me tell ya, IT WORKS I am starting to believe the things I say.
I know I am not the only person out there that is struggling with the ‘hidden rule’ of physical appearance and I never will be the only one, even if at times it feels like that I am. I look on insta and see these girls who are skinny, beautiful, and I compare and wish that I looked like them and I am sure they do the same thing. It is this vicious cycle in where we all want to look different than we do even when someone is looking at you and saying man, I wish I looked like her. I want to advocate that we start loving who we are and talking about the things we love about ourselves. In conversations with friends, talk about how good you feel or how wearing those cute heels because they make you feel confident. It is so easy to get caught up in the picture perfect that social media portrays, and I am so guilty of it. Hidden rules are sucky whether you are navigating how to have a conversation with another person or figuring out who you are in a world of “perfection,” so here is to loving ourselves from the inside out and the continued work that it takes to get to that place!
Oh and don’t forget YOU ARE GOOD, PRETTY, AND SMART ENOUGH!
Honestly Elise
