To really be confident and happy in yourself you have to love yourself at your worst. Be a bit dirty and smelly and tired and whatever and look at yourself in the mirror for like 10 minutes and say this is okay, this is fine, this is good. Give yourself the haircut your think is the ugliest and learn to live with it, learn to be okay. if you can do that you will be so strong. Record yourself and get used to all your annoying mannerisms, study them, become one with them. Know them and be cool with them. They are you, not all the time, but they are you and that's okay.
Trying to be beautiful won't help you as much as trying to be ugly (although I'm not criticising you for trying to be beautiful, that's normal too). When you make yourself ugly you might learn that being ugly is okay, being ugly is good, and then that being ugly is nonsense. Ugly stops meaning anything when it stops mattering. It's like that whole thing about fairies - if you don't believe in them, they don't exist. I don't believe in ugly.
I think the only way to really stop being ugly is to start being okay with being ugly. You're a vessel. A planet in a person shape. Everything about you moves. You can't control everything, but your perceptions are potentially very malleable. Keep funny faces next to your heart.
I love this post! It's really encouraging and inspiring. I think I'll practice making ugly faces in my mirror now, lol. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThank you, please do! x
DeleteReally inspiring!
ReplyDeleteThank you!
DeleteI! Feel! This! For me this is more like in terms of writing and sharing? The subjects we talk about and the ideas we present as much as carefully curated Cara Devigne esque no make up selfies!!! Like I think the ugliness of some of the things I choose to present, like when ppl read some of my stuff for dh and are like wow....this...is....uncomfortable...or with my blog when blogs are meant to be aspirational and mine is like a black hole of shit, ugly is a catalyst whilst beauty (both literal or otherwise is the neutral, an establishment of norms rather than challenging them!) And then there is questions of colonialism as well, what does post colonial beauty even mean in a culture such as ours when even the reactionary images are so rooted in whiteness! (see riot grrrl and all that jazz!) but equally defining visual away from both the borders of ugliness and (white) beauty is soooo necessary too, which is why i take so many selfies!!! me and my friend ashley call this the cookie cutter model of colonialsm, fixed outlines for bodies.... aaa I could think about this post for ever :''')))) XOXO
ReplyDeleteYES about the aspirational nature of blogging! There's such a push of polished and professional looking blogs. A level of sanitisation of yourself and your creativity to be as much as possible like a glossy magazine. I kinda veer between conventions of that sort of blogging and my honest journal-type thoughts and ideas. I quite like the balance I have between feel-good blogging and unfiltered ME blogging. I want to people happy and encouraged but I also want to be able to talk about anything I feel here. It's interesting to think about the tone differences between our blogs though, the different things we talk about, different approaches and stuff.
DeleteAlso yeah, this reminds me of so many things I see about fat acceptance and race and beauty, and I see this kind of photoshop culture sanitisation in people being that one type of fat or magazine pretty in some way. Black girls with very neat curls and so on. Amongst specific places/posts about accepting diverse beauty people are often still in the same poses or with more racially ambiguous features, etc. Also I noticed a trend of using very dark black bodies in this hyper colour aesthetic photographic compositions. Contrasting with bright pink backgrounds and things like they almost become this paint bucket filler for aesthetic rather than a person? It seems there's an abundance of "unrealness" for artistic purposes and less normal or less "pretty" images of black people and other POC. Like I see sort of candid shots of thin white people doing all sorts of things, in disposable camera type stuff especially, and it's still about the prettiness of those moments, but in a more "this is normal" kind of way? And that seems like quite a white thing? idk idk
Oooh yes definitely! Its weird I think about this stuff a lot, but the way I do my blog isn't very conscious or thought out it just sort of happens! I have no filter!! Saying that whilst my writing is....horrible...lol... in writing about fashion and make up and things I realise I have a wider audience that perhaps otherwise!? So perhaps that counteracts the other stuff as it is still (vaguely) within the outlines of a fashion blog?! But idk!
DeleteAnd yes I have noticed that trend also?! The idea of bodies of colour as an accessory for like a (white) aesthetics tumblr creeps me out? It also translates so much into the fashion industry itself....I often think the notion of aesthetics blogging and pale blogging feels very white, both literally in its obsession with minimalism, but also y'kno in the obvious race sense. There was a really cool bbc series on art stuff with each episode on a different colour and one was the on the colour white and how it operates in terms of power and institutions and it was just so so good, I think about that documentary so much! i think this is why simple narratives of visual culture ends up in such dodgy territory as it really exposes all the gross weirdness of our culture!!
Pale blogs are so interesting in how they're made up and in things like the co-option of images. Like how people reblog an image from someone's blog, from their life, and remove it from that to become the aesthetic. It's happened to a few of my pictures and even in one case a picture of myself (here's that picture with 30,000 notes atm) and it's an odd thing to have an image sort of taken away from you like that. Especially when someone is self-promoting with it. One of the weirdest things is when it's someone's webcam selfie, just there across pale blogs with thousands of notes and no caption.
DeleteI know!! like people make fun of those blogs, which like I get why as they don't really make sense in the sense that it's things like laptops in bathtubs, these sort of outlandish images executed with a seemingly straight face?! And oh my gosh I can imagine?! I haven't had any images of me used but sometimes porn blogs lurk on both my main blogger blog and on tumblr and its really creepy and just no?! One porn blog reblogged some random text post of mine, like a read more about colonialism and eating disorders and depression and its like why on earth would you reblog that lol?! I've had my tumblr for like 5 years and if you go back far enough my blog kinda goes into pale blog territory (or the equivelent circa 2010 or whatever) as I was struggling with eating disorders and was in that sort of thinspo tumblr circle where you just reblog pictures of people's veins and whatever so I think maybe as weird and dislocated as it might seem they do tell a story of some kind!
DeleteYeah I quite like the whole curation aspect of it. The oddness of an image that is WEIRD but purposefully collected for that weirdness. Glow blogs are really soothing and nice too.
DeleteAwesome blog post! Really! :)
ReplyDeletexoxo, Merce
www.its-mercedita.blogspot.de
Thanks!
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