Five year old self

“There was a time when you were five years old, and you woke up full of awesome. You knew you were awesome. You loved yourself. You thought you were beautiful, even with missing teeth and messy hair and mismatched socks inside your grubby sneakers. You loved your body, and the things it could do. You thought you were strong. You knew you were smart. 

Do you still have it? The awesome. Did someone take it from you? Did you let them? Did you hand it over, because someone told you weren’t beautiful enough, thin enough, smart enough, good enough? Why the hell would you listen to them? Did you consider they might be full of shit?   Wouldn’t that be nuts, to tell my little girl below that in another five or ten years she might hate herself because she doesn’t look like a starving and Photoshopped fashion model? Or even more bizarre, that she should be sexy over smart, beautiful over bold? 

Are you freaking kidding me? Look at her. She is full of awesome. You were, once. Maybe you still are. Maybe you are in the process of getting it back.   All I know is that if you aren’t waking up feeling like this about yourself, you are really missing out.” (I found this on Pinterest)

This is amazing. Nothing short of it. How often as girls do we look in the mirror or at each other and scrutinize what’s wrong with our features. I know I’m guilty of it. When did this negative thought-cycle start? Clearly, as grown women we are forced to compete with prettier, skinnier, and better-er women for men’s attention. So is that where it starts? When you start looking for a man, you start hating yourself for every flaw?

My dad has and does always tell me that I am perfect how I am. I know I know, he’s cute like that. Whenever I say out loud that I need to lose weight because I am the size of a whale or the Empire State Building (in NEEEEEEEWWW yOOOOORRRRKKK!!!) my dad gets this sad look on his face like he can’t believe I would think such a lie.

I hope that if/when I have a daughter, she never gets down about her appearance or what everyone else says she should look like. She deserves to be her own beautiful goofy self. And no man deserves her unless he sees that she is beautiful for one reason: She refused to believe the lie.