The Greatest Love of All

Today I was loading a website on my laptop, but it was taking a long time, so I ran upstairs to get something. When I returned, there was a picture of a beautiful woman on the screen. I remarked to myself, oh she is pretty, who is she? I looked closer, and realized that it was me. No lie. I did not recognize myself (it was the profile page of a site that I frequent, but it had loaded wrong so the site background was off and the picture was not in its usual spot, and I had forgotten that I was loading that page). Being the self-reflecting woman that I am, I started to connect this with other experiences that I have had with seeing pictures of women that I think are beautiful online or even women in person, and then realizing that they look like me (sometimes because others pointed it out to me). I used to play this Jedi mind trick on myself when I was suffering from a bout of low self esteem; I would pull pics of gorgeous women into a folder and then add pictures of me to the folder. It was a way of getting me to associate myself with what I considered beautiful.

Its hard for me to say that I am beautiful. You may be saying, well, you have mentioned it a few times already, lol, but it is true. For so long I have struggled with self image issues, and those struggles continue, from time to time. Perhaps that is partly why I have been remiss in posting as of late. But for so many of my formative years, I was told that I was ugly. I didn't believe it, not really,  and I now understand where viewpoint came from. I talk about it more in this post on my other blog. But even though I have mostly overcome those feelings of inferiority, I am sometimes plagued with self doubt. And then shame, because I have, at 35, still not conquered these issues. I still don't accept myself 100%.

Part of me feel its okay to not to be okay with me all the time. My spiritual path teaches that you have to be compassionate, not only with others, but with yourself. So I give myself a break for not having it all together, for not being totally self assured and self confident. I just have to remember to do and say the things which validate me, even when no-one else does. I must have love for myself. I must recognize and not be surprised by my own beauty.