Pep Talk: Honoring Your Own Unique Beauty

The confidence boost we all need to remember our deservingness to feel and express our beautiful individuality.

I’ve been spending all week thinking about all the ways feeling beautiful is so forbidden in our culture.

• How we’re told to never, ever feel beautiful or admit our beauty, otherwise people will find out we’re wicked and selfish and conceited.

• How we’re told to fear our beauty because men won’t be able to help themselves! We’ll be grabbed left and right!

• How we’re told to place our beauty in competition with other women. Who’s the fairest of them all? AKA who’s you’re favorite actress/pop princess/fitness instructor/influencer? What brand of personal beauty is your favorite: blonde, brunette, ombre?

I’ve also been thinking about all the ways massive institutions benefit off our feeling ashamed of our unique beauty. Movies with surgeried actresses, music videos with manufactured bodies, fashion brands with ‘inclusive’ - yet selectively ideal - models, wellness and skincare brands and their never-ending solutions for your symptoms, all of which are unattainably expensive. Not to mention ask that you abandon your body’s natural healing mechanisms…

I’m here to remind you the power of honoring your own unique beauty.

It is a rebellious act to honor and celebrate the beauty that is all yours, only yours, unique to you.

A defiance to the bullies who told you that you don’t deserve to love yourself.
To the corporations that benefit from your staying small.
To the negative critic inside you that is dead wrong about your worth.

An entire lineage, hundreds of people infact, came before you to make up the unique recipe that is your features, your DNA, your every cell.

You are not here by accident. You are here on divine orders, protected by divine law.

You are not here to fit some mold of ‘beauty’. Your personal, unique, totally one-of-a-kind beauty cannot be put into a mold and by the very nature of it being personal, unique, and totally one-of-a-kind cannot be compared to another’s beauty.

It’s yours alone.

And be honest: you are done shrinking, aren’t you? You’re done hiding your favorite clothes in the back of the closet so that people at work don’t call you ‘too much’.

You’re done staring at your gorgeous face in the mirror and criticizing it. The bullies taught you to be a bully, but you’re over it, aren’t you?

It’s never worked. Bullying and criticizing yourself has never worked to change you. So drop it.

Trust me, you do not want to miss the magic that will happen when you finally let yourself do what you’ve always longed to do: honor and celebrate your own beauty. Feel beautiful in your own way. Make the world more beautiful by bringing your true self to it.

These are holy acts. And this one life is the only chance you have to fulfill them. They are why you came to earth and you are wasting your time here pretending that you have to live by someone else’s made-up rules. Rules that were made to keep you small and silent.

You are not on that playground anymore with the mean kids telling you that you aren’t good enough. You aren’t back in middle school, you aren’t back in that moment where someone else made you believe you aren’t pretty enough, attractive enough, worthy enough for what you want.

You are not the adult in the room, in charge of that child’s feelings. And it’s time you stand up and start acting on her behalf, making her entire life a safe space for her to express who she is in whatever way she wants.

So today, tomorrow, this whole week, the rest of your life:

Give yourself permission to be beautiful. Feel beautiful.

And give yourself a damn break from worrying all the time that someone is going to come along and cut you down and tell you you don’t deserve it.

You f*cking do. It’s your f*cking life. And you’re running out of time to live it out loud.