We’re all seeking perfection. We’re all seeking for something that meets our expectations and then we can make ours. In the same way, we’re looking forward to meet someone’s expectations so that someone can make us theirs and we can feel important…but how can we expect to be loved by someone else if we haven’t fallen in love with ourselves first?
Most of the times we’re too hard on us, I should know that… I’m my cruelest judge, and I have seen that many people do that to themselves too. I don’t know why is it that we hurt and criticize our own ideas, our own body and everything we can control in seek of the best we can get… please don’t misunderstand these words, looking for the best in ourselves is one thing that I really support but what I find so sad is that we really destroy our self-love by diminishing what we do or what we are.
Ever since we’re kids we’re taught to love and respect others, not to hurt or say anything cruel about someone, respect nature and animals but it seems like we’re not really taught how to love and respect ourselves. We are programmed with certain kind of rules that we need to live by; take the classic Ten Commandments for example, the Catholic Church took certain common sense rules and made them part of its basic life instructions: “Thou shall not lie, Thou shall not kill, Thou shall worship your God, honor your father and mother…” it really looks they have it all covered up by these rules and most of the good typical mothers around the world teach their kids that common sense included in these commandments (even if they aren’t Catholic), but it seems like we’ve all forgotten about honoring, respecting and not hurting ourselves. It’s always been about judging what we do to others but what about what we do to ourselves???
How do you teach a kid to be strong, confident and self-loving? How do you teach them that it is only their own opinion of themselves that counts? And not what the media or the society thinks? If we haven’t managed to grasp this “self-love” philosophy ourselves, how do we expect our offspring will get it? Especially with the media dedicated to spread false values.
If you look for the word “model” in a dictionary you’ll find something like this: “One serving as an example to be imitated or compared” no wonder why we feel the urge to be like the models our modern society has presented to us. Just by definition we know that a model is something that we need to be, that we need to learn from, the problem is that those models are exactly what we don’t need to be. Their surreal and false version of beauty is accomplished with the valuable help of Photoshop and starvation, tools obviously hidden from the youngest who have no idea that what they’re seeing goes against any doctor’s orders.
When this false perfection meets our low self-esteem we get stupid people who know nothing about real values and have not a clue of how beautiful and worthy they really are.
Maybe we can’t really be taught what is beautiful or not but we can surely be trained to respect and love ourselves, stand up for whatever people may reject about us and do for ourselves what we expect from others: love us.
The Bible might have forgotten to write “Thou shall love thyself” as a commandment but now, thousands of years later we know that certain “modern values” are not good at all and that we’re not forced to follow them. We are able to see that if it doesn’t make us a better person, then no value or opinion should be accepted by us.
We can have the courage to be opinionated and defend what we are. Nowadays more and more people are starting to open their eyes and making their own decisions, they’re not followers of some trend anymore. Fashion itself has become challenging to what used to be “accepted” so why can’t we challenge those vain values that are only hurtful and transitory?
I dare me and you to be comfortable with who we are even though it´s against what we see on tv. What do you say?
As images can speak louder than words, I'll leave you with this great ad part of the campaign for real beauty by Dove.
