Looking Beyond the Surface

I believe in a thing called self love.

Everything started in the 5th grade; I had big, bulky braces and my frizzy hair stuck up every which way. I was teased by anyone who didn’t bother to look beyond my skin. I held myself high, but I couldn’t hold up for too long. How could I hold my ground when everybody else wanted to bury me six feet beneath it?

In 6th grade the braces came off and I learned to do my hair. The same people that who would make fun less than a year before somehow had the impression that we were friends. Well they weren’t even close. Even though I had so many people in my family tell me I was beautiful, I could never believe a word that they said, it felt like it was me against the world. I lived like the uphills were mountains and the downhills were cliffs. And sometimes jumping was the only way to go; the only way to escape from their hurtful words. The good times seemed so rare that they didn’t seem real, like at any moment you could wake up and it would all be gone.

Eventually my family started to see past my fake smile, and past the wall I hid myself behind every day. They knew I was broken. When I would look in the mirror, the only thing I could see was the frizzy hair and braces version of myself. “If thats really what you see, then get your shoes, we’re going to get you a better mirror” those words were all it took for my life to turn around. Just one person to care enough to try and knock down the wall I built around my broken heart.

I realized after that, that what they said wasn’t true at all. They didn’t know me, they only knew my smile, not the pain behind it. They never realized how their words actually hurt, and how there would always be a broken part of me.

Self love is a way to push past their words, a way to have the strength to hold yourself up, and a way of general survival, because you have to love yourself before anybody can love you. But its never that easy. No matter what, everybody struggles with it at some point in life. My mother was bullied all her life, and still to this day shes beautiful or enough for anybody. But now she’s raising 3 kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word mom, because they see her heart before they see her face.

I know that all through school, I would look at people and think, oh I wish I had her hair or those shoes, when I should have really been thinking; this is me this is who I am and this is what I am going to be forever.

We are all flawed, but I believe that self-love, is simply looking a little beyond your surface.