Everyone always tells you that the path to true happiness is self-love. On one hand, it sounds like something a guru would say and something you would hear and not really dwell on, and on the other hand, it is something very few truly manage. For it would mean never comparing yourself to anyone else – for the positive or the negative. Whether it is job, money, men, friendships, and any other form of validation. This can apply to every aspect of your life but one area it hit home acutely recently is beauty.
We all think we know what beauty it is more so because beauty, as school aphorisms have made us mug up, lies in the eye of the beholder. But does beauty also mean that if the beholder thinks you could use some improvements, your beauty lies diminished? All along people would say things like ..’but you are tall,’ or ‘your nose looks like HER nose’ or many other such lines and I would think, so what? I don’t like what I see in the mirror so these lines mean naught to me. Just because you like some part of me better, does not change any thing for me.
In the last two odd years how I look at myself has changed. I do not know if it has changed in a good way or bad but my worth is not comparative anymore. I feel so much better now. And all I seem to want to do is want my other girl friends to understand why. In the process of trying to explain to them, I realised that it is perhaps a step they need to journey to on their own. I know I faced a lot of negativity when I changed the way I look. I changed it because I changed the way I thought. It affected people I did not expect because they perhaps weighed themselves against how they thought I was. That truly was my inkling. I have not changed, I would think, why have they?
Sometime ago I remember discussing with another writer how India needed its own Jezebel because there were bound to be women who had a mind of their own and weren’t afraid to own it. But Indian women are too far away from that. I am an urban, educated working woman and it is unbelievable how many conversations that I have been party to are about men, how to get them, what to do to get them, why we weren’t getting them, are we not attractive enough (therefore) and so on and so forth. This post stood out like a beacon on my feed home page. Another post on why it is important to accept what you are without qualifications.
It does not matter whether you are a feminist or not, a house wife or not, a mother or not or trying to fulfill one of the many roles you are expected to or not, if you believe in your core, nobody can take that away. Otherwise you are constantly a shell, trying to fill it with substance you think others want to see there.
The Age of Aquarius 