Self Love: This Is What I Look Like

I once had a girlfriend, my best friend, in the seventh grade, call me ugly. She laughed, and she was being funny. She thought she was being funny. But yes, she giggled, and called me “ugly.”

Girls can be so mean. So very mean.

I shrugged it off. I don’t know why it didn’t break me.

The very first guy I almost lost my virginity to, I was 15, was my biggest, deepest crush at the time, and we came very, very close to closing the deal. I was staying with my aunt for the summer, and she worked graveyard shift as an electrician. He was my cousin’s best friend, and he was 19. He was beautiful. He sang me songs, he brought me flowers, he did everything that I now recognize as typical player/predator behavior.

He was on his back, and I was straddling him. We were almost completely naked, and he looked up at me and said, laughing, “You look like Jim Morrison.”

It Didn’t Break Me

I don’t know why these comments don’t break me. It has been a long time since anyone has dared to insult me. I am now, proudly, a force to be reckoned with.

But I was once soft, and vulnerable, and gooey on the inside. Innocent.

My mother never raved over my looks and told me I was a great beauty or anything, so I don’t know why these people who thoughtlessly tore me down didn’t break me. It’s not like I had stores of physical appearance self confidence in my back pocket.

Unusual Looks

I have always known though, that my looks are unusual. I have my mother’s big nose; freckles spout from every surface of skin; my body is athletic even when I am at my heaviest; I just look like a big athlete.

And for some reason, I have always been comfortable with my looks. I think I’m pretty. And it took me a long, long time to realize that my confidence in my looks comes from my confidence in myself, which breezes from my internal self love through my exterior physical presence and shows up there, on the surface.

I am attractive because I feel attractive. I feel attractive because I feel strong, smart, and capable. Those are traits I have always carried around with me. Those are traits my mother did rave about. My mother gave birth to her first child, a girl, me, and determined that she would be strong, smart, and capable. She told me I would be a rebel, a sea in a storm, a social butterfly, confident, patient, and wise.

All the things she never thought she was.

And I was. I was, am, all those things, brimming with self confidence and a fully fleshed out love of my own appearance. I knew very well that some people weren’t attracted to me, but that was their problem, not mine.

Beautiful Mother

 

When I became a mother, I had to rediscover my own sense of beauty. My stomach had an incision that cut my midsection in half, with a big flap of flabby skin that just flopped over the incision. Super gross.

And when my daughter was still very little, early in her toddlerhood, I read an amazing article about why moms should stay in the picture. The argument is that if we have to always be perfect to be in a picture, we won’t be in many of the pictures of our family.

Being who I am, bold and daring, I decided right then and there, I would be in the picture. My daughters would look back and see me smiling with them, no matter what.

Thus began my journey through the land of selfies.

This Is, After All, What I Look Like

And that’s what I had to realize. This is what I look like, in the morning in bed, hair tousled, kids crawling all over me, in the evening, booty shorts and a tank top, hair up on top of my head, no makeup on, driving to the park, swimming with my kids.

This is what I look like. And everybody knows it. When we take pictures of ourselves only at what we consider our absolute best looking, we begin to live under this illusion that we have to actually be that way all the time, our best looking, best performing selves. Perfect.

I am the first, middle, and last person to tell you I am not perfect.

I am a badass.

But I am not perfect.

And since my life for over ten years has been all about being the most honest, authentic, unfiltered version of myself with everyone at all times that I can be, this challenge fit perfectly with the me that I have been growing into. “This is who I am” quickly became integrated with “this is what I look like.”

Social Media and Reality

My writing, my social media accounts, the mom in the park, and the educator in the tutoring center all have the same voice, the same tone, the same views, and the same, smile, slightly turned up on one side. There is no vs. in my life. Social media is not versus reality; it is social media and reality. I do this so that I never get caught unawares. I never have to think of which lie I told to whom, which perfectly placed picture I fooled someone with, which persona I am trying to maintain.

Life is full and complex enough. I have children to care for, a husband to train (haha, love you honey), and a career to build. I also have myself to care for, friends to spend quality time with and extended family to keep in touch with. I don’t need to also think about which face I put on for which part of my life.

Embrace Exposure

We live in an exposed time. I read articles and listen to parent’s fears about how our children are growing up in front of cameras, exposed to social media and technology at too young an age. Lamentations abound over “highlight reels” and competition for a better newsfeed.

I don’t have the space in my life, physically or mentally, to worry about overexposure, competition, and highlight reels. The reality is that in almost all cases, exposure is a good thing, if it is actual exposure, exposure of the truth.

The internet has exposed racism, violence, sexual assault, and corruption in ways never before heard of. The world is not an uglier place now than it was fifty, one hundred, or one thousand years ago (ever heard of the Christian Crusades?). It is merely exposed for us all to see.

And with that exposure has come recognition, and with recognition, action.

So I say we expose ourselves. If we embrace exposure, take the pictures, and stay in the pictures, we can get comfortable in our skin. Women especially can work toward an end to competition. We all have our good and bad days, our vain days and our prideful days. Give in to them all. You live your life, and you take pictures. You might as well take the pictures of your actual life. The more you embrace just being yourself on the camera, the less you will feel the need to be perfect on the camera, and the more relaxed you will become in your own life, hot mess and all. And we can get a fuller picture of each others’ real lives, and fall in love.

This Is What Life Looks Like

“You don’t really see a lot of pictures of Celaya smiling. She has such a serious look.” I have gotten this comment for many years. Lately, my five year old has begun to ham it up for the camera, so I have to work hard to catch her unawares. But what is funny is that she is not a serious child. She is one of the happiest, bubbliest, most extroverted social kids I have ever met, and her friends parents all agree. I just never shout “say cheese!” when I take a picture.

We live life. I see a moment that looks like a good glimpse into our lives, and I try to catch it. I post a lot of pictures on social media. I post every day. But you won’t usually catch me with my phone in my hand. When I am out and about, I am spending time with my kids or my parent friends, phone forgotten. So the idea that taking a lot of pictures of your life or your kids somehow means you are missing out on life is rubbish (sorry, I’m reading a lot of Nigerian literature, and apparently I am adopting the language.) Rubbish!

We head out of the house, I take a quick pic, and move on. We wake up in the morning, and a scene unfolds in bed with children bouncing and adorable, I take a quick pic, and move on. Candid photos provide us with an opportunity to love each others’ vulnerability. I take photos the way I write, in an appeal to my friends, my family, my followers, my audience, to love this moment as much as I do.

And when I am loving this or that moment, I want to be in the picture at least once or twice. Because pictures provide wonderful memories to look back on, and I want my kids to see me there. I want to remember how beautiful I felt, how sleepy I was, how fat or skinny I was, how that bathing suit felt or what great walking shoes those were. I want to be in the picture, because my pictures are of my life.

And I am a pretty big part of my life.