Friday Favorites

Happy November!

Let's start off November thinking about ourselves and how we see ourselves - what has happened to our self esteem?  I know my boy has to remind me daily that I am beautiful - because I simply cannot see what he does.  I know I've been brainwashed by the media and what society considers "beautiful", and now I'm on a path to figure out how to take that back.

Let's start with the lies we tell ourselves to be liked.  These are the lies that we feel we need to tell in order for people to consider us "worthy".  Why can't we just be worthy because of who we are?  I definitely struggle with this - while I don't lie about where I went to college, I know it's not what was "expected" so I say it with a bit of a grimace.  I've gotten better about it - it was probably one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life, but it does not fit into the image I thought I needed to have in order to have people think well of me.

I think knowing the real Jessica Rabbit is important - she had a manufactured image.

His first move was to have three expensive dresses made for her — without backs. He then titled his client “The Back” and had her appear at previews and parties in her plunging creations. Soon local photographers zeroed in on Miss Dougan’s bare spinal column, and gagsters began originating such cracks as, “Vikki Dougan makes the best exits in town.”

Petra Collins wrote a beautiful article after her instagram profile was deleted....

To those who reported me, to those who are disgusted by my body, to those who commented "horrible" or "disgusting" on an image of ME, I want you to thoughtfully dissect your own reaction to these things, please think about WHY you felt this way, WHY this image was so shocking, WHY you have no tolerance for it. Hopefully you will come to understand that it might not be you thinking these things but society telling you how to think.

Are you as horrified as I am that these are the autocompletes for Googling "Women"?

This article had a few paragraphs that hit me really hard:

The world doesn’t owe us a big compliment about the way we look, but we should be able to feel good about ourselves, and it would help a lot if we weren’t being told all the time that our appearances were really important. Maybe the most important thing about us. In practically every book I read as a kid where there was a male protagonist, his love interest would be the prettiest girl around. It was like that was the baseline requirement. She had to start out effortlessly being the prettiest, and then after that she could have a personality. Beauty sounded like something all the really awesome girls automatically had.

This program in NYC is the best thing I've heard about in a while.  LONG LIVE BEAUTIFUL REAL GIRLS!