Loving myself

A few days ago, I was looking back at some of the things I had written when I first started this blog. One of the things I wrote was this 'I recently looked in the mirror and tried to find any resemblance between myself and twiggy. Because i thought if there was, i would have at least a reassurance that my face was pretty' (That was during my twiggy phase)

If I could travel back in time and meet fifteen year old me, I would give her a hug and tell her she was (and is) beautiful. But I would also know she'd have heard that before, and it would take a while before she actually would believe it.

My younger self was a microcosm of what is a common occurrence- 96% of women worldwide do not consider themselves beautiful. My own perception of inadequacy probably began when I was still a child; people used to tell me I looked like Fann Wong ( "No, Fann Wong looks like her." My dad 

would always quip back at them), and strange as it might seem, I began to view beauty as a necessary standard to be met. I had to look as good as Fann Wong. Fail to do so and I would not even be me. 

Social standards are definitely an important determinant of our self-perception. We expect to conform to a certain standard of beauty, one that is reinforced by social media, beautiful filters and cosmetics. All these have the potential to enhance (and make us 'more than' what we normally are) and can even become an art form for expression, but often they are used to make us feel just adequate. That means we perceive our normal selves as 'less than'. Everything we are is no longer sufficient - something in our very identity, the core of our selves has been diminished by our inability for us to accept our appearance. When we reject part of ourselves-we lose it completely, and that doesn't make us happier, it reinforces negativity.

Notice that a lot of the time, it is our own selves that plants this negative self perception. Although we rely on the comments and compliments of others to build up our own mental mirror reflection, it is our own self that accepts or rejects or basically ascribes weight to these comments and compliments. One example is how studies have shown that women tend to believe the compliments given them by men but they disregard compliments given them by women. We have our own choice in who we listen to or do not listen to. As Chantelle Brown Young, a woman with the skin condition vitiligo, says 'The only person that can make you feel that you aren’t beautiful is you. You can’t let someone else lower your self-esteem because that’s what it is — self-esteem, you need to first love yourself before you have anybody else love you.'

People who deliberately or unknowingly pull you down with their words also contribute to negative self perception. My father has a habit of calling larger people we see as we drive around in the car 'ah fat!'. Somehow, this always gave me the lingering impression that being fat is undesirable and repulsive, and also that my size had something to do with how much my father loved me. I never attributed my strange fear of being fat to the possibility of a perception cultivated by the disparagement of size I have been exposed to, until I realised I was unconsciously perpetrating it. When I first started using Instagram, I used to caption pictures of food with half-joking quips like 'My friends are going to make me fat' or  'the fat life chose me', until one day a friend who was herself struggling with body image texted me. She said that my captions were incredibly discouraging; my self deprecating captions had the potential to act as a negative comparison for other people who did not feel secure and send them deeper into negative self-perception.

Another contribution to negative self-perception can be building an identity that is overtly fixated on a facade of healthy and happy living. Orthorexia, a new eating disorder, is increasingly a buzzword as people realise how our culture of health may be making us even more unhealthy, if not physically then at least mentally. I remember in the beginning of J2, I decided to take a healthy turn in my diet and immediately cut carbohydrates from my meals as much as possible. I was convinced that carbohydrates gave you sugar spikes that would ruin your liver, and were calorie dense in a bad way, and low in nutrients compared to things like meat (I wasn't yet vegetarian) and vegetables. I still recall waking up early in the morning to pack salads in my bag - some days I would be too tired to think of creative salads and they would be a pathetic collection of limp lettuce, tomato and cucumber. People would ask me if I even enjoyed it, and although I could think of plenty other things that would taste way better, I would force a smile and say, "It's really good! I love salad!", trying to maintain my image and also my self-belief/identity as a 'healthy, happy' individual. However, I was far from healthy (carbs are actually very healthy for you!) and far far far from happy. I don't think I ever got as bad as orthorexia because of my ongoing love affair with chocolate and also I found out that carbohydrates are essential for brain function including MEMORY (one of my worst fears is dementia), however, what I do know is that my pursuit of wellness had made me live a restricted, miserable life. As Hannah Darvas puts it, "Eating well is amazing, and can really alter your life in so many ways, but when it manifests itself into an addiction or means of control, it no longer can be deemed healthy. Running a mile from your truly favourite foods out of fear because of their 'fat content'...'unhealthy ingredients list'...'what they'll do to your waistline' is nothing but wasted time, wasted worry, and most importantly a huge drain on your happiness and mental sanity; even if you don't see it. Too often we can become sealed within our healthy bubble that we become proud of the willpower that we have. But have you ever questioned that? Will you look back at yourself in 15 years and say, 'wow, I'm really proud for missing out on all of the time spent with friends eating my favourite treats and having fun so that I could eat clean'...will you? I certainly won't be one of those people. You're not 'cheating' anything when you're tucking into what you love. But you are cheating yourself out of life and enjoyment when you shield yourself away from the real world and what amazing things life has to offer you." The growing culture of health foods and wholeness can go too far, leading to an insidious negative self-perception that hangs in the impossible and tenuous balance of remaining strictly and perfectly healthy.

There are probably other reasons that contribute to negative self perception when it comes to physical appearance - things like body scrutinization (putting someone in a leotard in the middle of a class of thinny girls is enough to make any one conscious of their body - a girl in my ballet class has been getting thinner and thinner and I don't know how to tell her she is beautiful without a thigh gap), or even culture (I'm pretty sure exclaiming 'I am SO INCREDIBLY AND WONDERFULLY BEAUTIFUL!!!!!' would be considered rather arrogant in Asian societies, unless maybe if your accompanied it with psalm 139). However, I have less personal experience with those and I'm not sure exactly how the mind process behind that works itself into a person to make them doubt their own existence as a truly amazingly beautiful human .

So how did my self perception change? If you ask me now if I think I am beautiful, I'd say 'Yes, yes and YES.' 

I think certainly something that helped me see myself as beautiful was seeing myself through the eyes of someone else. Just as Dove's Real Beauty sketches showed the gulf between women's perceptions of themselves and other women's perceptions of them, I realised that if I saw myself as a stranger did, I would see a lot more of myself that I loved. And as I waved a tentative hello to the other, beautiful me in the mirror, introduced myself, talked to myself, rediscovered the secret longings and musings of my soul, and slowly fell in love with myself. I became myself, just as lovers morph into an inseparable entity that encapsulates the best of both of them, so I became that very beautiful girl I saw and believed. Things like reading old blog posts and smiling at my quaint expression or my sudden poetic bursts, and seeing old pictures of me laughing as I hugged a friend, or grinning after a wonderful choir performance made me realise just how much of myself I really appreciated when I saw myself from a distance. And even as I got closer, I remained beautiful in my own sight.

Another, thing that helped me (Don't sigh and roll your eyes) were my beliefs - in particular in Christianity (which of course should be the centre of everything, and why not my self-perception?) and vegetarianism. When you keep telling yourself that before time even began, when the universe was a seething mass of darkness, God had you in mind - it kind of floors you to realise how amazingly precious you are. The hands that carved mountains and traced rivers and ran themselves through the whispering branches of trees also carved smile lines and traced my cupid's bow and ran themselves through my life-giving arteries. The wonderful beauty of the creator and his creation makes you believe that you cannot possibly be anything less than wonderful yourself - God never makes mistakes. Also, after I began eating with compassion in mind, I realised that it was silly to care so much for animals and not care properly for myself! Compassion is something everyone and everything deserves, and I needed to extend it to myself as well so that it becomes a never-ending well within me, something that I tie so deeply to my identity that it will overflow and touch everything and everyone I meet.

Finally, something that continues to make me determined to love myself and never succumb to the twisted seduction of negativity is seeing how other people fail to love themselves. When I told my Mum last night that only 4% of women think they are beautiful, she told me she wasn't one of them. But if you knew my mother, you'd know she has the most beautiful nose on earth and also the most beautiful heart, which of course is more important. On Christmas day, when I tried to persuade a friend to come swimming with me, and lent her my swimming costume to change into, she handed it back to me and implied that she was 'too fat' to. Hannah later reprimanded me for continually asking her to just try it anyway, because in my over-eagerness to GO SWIMMING I didn't notice her discomfort, and Hannah reminded me that 'not every one is as comfortable with their body as you are'. I think an embarrassment about body image is so common, and when I see someone who isn't proud of how God has physically created him or her, and recognise my past self-consciousness, I ache for him or her, but at the same time I become more determined than ever never to go back to that negative mind frame.

Beauty is certainly in the eye of the beholder, but what is so important to realise is that you are the beholder. You have the power to see just how beautiful you are despite your imperfections. Imperfections are interesting - I would certainly rather see a movie with conflict and plot twists and characters with fundamental flaws than one that was entirely happy from start to finish. Although the world will always have some standard of commercial beauty, that is not to say we are not beautiful. We are free to enjoy life, to reach out and grab it and hold it close and inhale it's beautiful wonderful smell of possibility, and then leap the world's ties and do what we have always wanted to, in compassion and love and humility, empowered by our confidence and belief in ourselves. And that is really beautiful.

'Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.' - Marianne Williamson

Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among the white clouds?