Picture Perfect

Greetings, friends.  I hope you’re having a fat-tabulous day.  I know I am.  I feel beautiful inside and out and I hope you do, too.  From time to time I’ll share some photos of myself that aren’t exactly flattering to prove I’m okay with myself.  I encourage you to share some of yourselves!  If you don’t feel like sharing, that’s fine.  But I encourage you to at least take pictures of yourself to enjoy privately.  Train yourself to ignore the double chin or the love handles.  Choose instead to look at your eyes.  Appreciate the depth they have.  Look at your hair and its different hues. Look at your smile.  If you’re not smiling, why not?  Celebrate you.  Find that thing about yourself that you really like and remind yourself why you really like it. (p.s. It’s okay if the thing you like is your boobs.  I love my boobs.)  This is me in all my plus size glory:

As I said yesterday, this blog is for all you ‘normals’ too.  Yes, even thin people have things they hate.  Is your nose a little crooked?  Have small boobs?  Maybe there’s a gap between your front teeth.  Whatever the flaw might be, ignore it.  It doesn’t define you.  Find that feature that everyone always compliments you on and focus on it.

The purpose of this exercise is to get all of us to step outside ourselves.  Step out of your body and look at it as a friend or loved one would see you.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a social situation and someone pulls out a camera causing me to flee as quickly as possible.  We shy away from pictures because we didn’t style our hair this morning or we’re not wearing makeup, or we’re in sweatpants.  Now, here comes the hammer of truth so brace yourselves.  THOSE THOUGHT ARE RIDICULOUS.  Your friends and loved ones already see you. They’ve seen you with your hair pulled back, no mascara, wearing your old ratty NKOTB t-shirt.  They see you and think you look so beautiful that the moment should be recorded for posterity.

I recently read an article where a woman shared the fact that she doesn’t have any pictures of herself with her kids.  She rationalizes that she’s not in any pictures because she’s the one behind the camera, but that’s just a put on.  She’s not in any pictures because she’s only slept 28 minutes since they day her first child was born.  She’s not in pictures because her curling iron died during the Clinton administration and she hasn’t had cause to replace it.  She’s not in pictures because her “gym membership” is chasing a three year old around the playground trying to get him to stop eating dirt.  But by the end of the article she realizes that her kids have seen her at her VERY worst and still love her and want pictures with her.  Those pictures will be a gift to her children long after she’s gone.

So, my point here is not to avoid the camera.  Make an effort to record special moments.  Whether you’ve brushed your hair or not, you’ll want to keep those memories.  A very good friend of mine (shout out to Mimi) coined the term “usie” (as opposed to selfie).  Get all your friends together and create a memory worth recording.  Ignore everyone’s frizzy hair, and big thighs, and crooked smiles.  All that’s left is the love and true beauty.