So, I feel I need to start with an apology. I'm a horrible blogger. To be fair, I knew this about myself. I have commitment issues when it comes to non-academic, non-deadline writing. Quite frankly, I'd usually rather be knitting. Or reading. Or cooking. Or just not writing. But despite my self-proclaimed issues with blogging, I feel compelled to make a go of it (despite a two month hiatus).
So here I am on the far end of summer, and ruminating on what has happened in the last few months and what is looming in the not-so-distant future (Coming soon: The Return of the Grad School Menace). While I hope in the days to come to give an update on the goings of the summer and what's to come as I start my doctoral studies in the fall, today's post is about something else entirely. As the title suggests, it's a bit of a challenge.
Lately (read: this summer), I've been feeling a little less than stellar about myself, particularly physically. It's not necessarily always about weight (though I will be the first to admit I'm not going to be on the cover of Vogue any time this century), but rather a more general discontent with my appearance on a scarily regular basis. One day I'm convinced my clothes make me look like a blind, frumpy, school teacher. The next, my hair makes me look like a boy. A week from that I'm bloated and resemble photographs of beached whales. My makeup feels wrong. I see scars where I used to see skin. I just generally have been feeling unimpressive and sometimes downright ugly.
It came to a head in particular this past weekend when I spent a weekend trying to find pantyhose in mall department stores (none had one large enough that wasn't "tummy control and shape enhancing") to wear with a dress I had to get in a plus size so the bust would fit. I spent evenings and many meals with people who were obsessed with talking about foods they couldn't/wouldn't eat because of carbs/calories/macros*/fat/sugars that would be damaging to their perfectly healthy, thin, fit bodies and all of the different trendy exercises they do daily at the gym while I ate my food and tried to ignore the number of mysteriously evil, fat inducing things it contained. I felt like a cow. It was awful.
Now while this post is not meant to be a pity party, that weekend was shaping up to be one. I was feeling pretty self-loathing about my appearance and then feeling self-loathing about obsessing so much about my physical appearance. So today, I'm putting my foot down. Enough is enough. I'm am a self-declared feminist who prides herself on knowing that self-worth has nothing to do with size, weight, clothing, makeup, etc. I address emails and text messages to most of my friends "Hey Beautiful" and end conversations with "See you Gorgeous" believing women don't ever hear enough how valuable and truly lovely they are without such compliments being attached to specific physical attributes. But when it comes to myself I am a shameless hypocrite.
So I'm taking on a challenge. For the month of August, I'm going to Instagram a picture a day that makes me feel beautiful. Shameless selfies. Accomplishments. Small moments. Anything that reminds me that I am a beautiful person, even if I fail to see it sometimes. It isn't about being self-centered or vain. It's about accepting that beauty does not have to be limited to a single viewpoint. Beauty is self-defined. And I can be beautiful.
I invite you to take up the challenge as well. Every day for the month of August, I invite you to post a picture of your beauty (a selfie, an object, a location, an event; if you can justify it, you can post it). With the hashtag #bebeautiful and let's choose to define beauty under our own terms. Who's with me?
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*Don't ask me what they are. I just know they apparently cause you to get fat. Apparently so does everything else.
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