Last year, a stranger told me that I could be a “pretty good plus-sized model.”
I don’t know why he said it, but it wasn’t an easy comment to forget. I had focused on my weight for my entire life, and he was speaking directly to the insecurities that I carried around with me for so long.
Disclaimer: I think plus-size models are beautiful. I just don’t want to be one.
What bothered me so much about his comment was that he pointed out that my weight — one of my biggest insecurities — was not good enough.
Therefore, I wasn’t good enough.
I didn’t fit what our culture perceives as normal. But even worse than the fact he had said this to me, was that I believed it; I let it control the way I thought of myself.
This was a pivotal moment. What I realized that day was that I had given over my confidence to the people around me. I had been aiming for a perfection that I saw in the culture surrounding me, and the further I got from that perfection, the worse I felt about myself.
But here’s the thing: beauty is not perfection.
What I had to learn — and what I am still learning every day — is that being beautiful is not limited to one particular body type. It is not the false perfection that we see advertised every day.
Beauty is this: a person unveiling her biggest insecurities and loving herself even more for her imperfections. It is forgetting about comparison. It’s diverse, it’s interesting, it’s boundless. For me, beauty is the recognition that the love I had for myself could not be regulated by others.
When that man approached me that day, he showed me how much I had been relying on other people’s approval for my confidence and self-worth. And I know I’m not alone in this. It’s why eating disorders exist. It’s why we can’t look in a mirror without finding something wrong with the reflection. It’s why we pin certain types of girls on our Pinterest boards in hopes of one day looking more like them and less like ourselves. It’s why we are told to measure our worth by the size of our thigh gap. It’s because we believe that the people around us determine our beauty.
But this can change. It must change. Let’s reject the idea that we are only beautiful if we meet an unrealistic expectation of “perfection.” Let’s look at the imperfections that make us distinct, and let’s love what we see — not in spite of them — but because of them. Let’s begin to see ourselves the way God sees us: a beautiful reflection of His own image.
Practically, this can look different for each of us. For me, a realistic step was writing down the negative thoughts that I had about myself throughout the day. When the day was over, I would dig deeper into these thoughts by asking: where was I when I had these thoughts, why did I have them, and how could I turn them into positive thoughts about myself?
Whatever it may look like for you, find ways to turn your thoughts around. A good place to start is to be aware of the insecurities that you have on a daily basis. Only then can you begin to change your mindset, and truly appreciate what it is that makes you who you are.
Photo (Flickr CC) by Frank Kovalchek.
