What makes me laugh when I look back is how people responded. The people who I told were rather appalled; I mean, come on, voluntarily not wearing make-up or dressing up to school? To some, not everyone, the idea is one never to be considered. Then... there are the people who didn't know. Their responses were, although full of concern, a little bit stressful. I got comments like, "what happened to your eyes?" and, "are you okay? You look really different," or "did you not sleep at all?" These were stressful because, to be honest, taking these two things away was difficult. Which begs the question, why did I do this to myself?
Well, I did it because I felt I was becoming increasingly vain and dependent on appearance to win people over. I realized that I counted on make-up to feel pretty. Not only is that bad but I'd feel the amount I had on wasn't enough so then put more and more on as time went on. Just like any other dependency on something that will not satisfy, this was going somewhere I didn't want to follow. For the make-up part, I had to stop until I found myself just as pretty without it; only then would putting make-up on not be an unhealthy habit. As for the not "dressing up" part of the week, that had to do more with how other people felt about me. I use clothing as a form of expression and to show my individuality... this is not a bad thing. The problem was that as time went on the question that I subconsciously asked myself when putting things on went from, "what is this saying?" to "what will people think of this and think of me?" We live in a world where it is impossible to please everyone or to make everyone like you, so to start caring about what everyone thought would lead only to dissatisfaction and unhappiness and thus, take away the fun I find in "dressing up." So... I stopped "dressing up" until I understood that the clothes I wear can make a statement, yes, but I am the one that allows that and that the statement applies to... so, I can make said statement without "dressing up." Haha. Yeah, that probably doesn't make sense.
What I got out of it was more than I asked for, in a good way. I learned about myself and my self-image and what I wanted out of my appearance. Haha my notes and journal entries from that week are really interesting to me and full of epiphanies but what I realized as I read over them was that the epiphanies were all things people had told me multiple times, I just never heard them. We can be told something a thousand times but until we learn, come to believe or realize it for ourselves we will never hear them. One thing however, a thought that crossed my mind on Day 3, I had never been told before... which actually makes me sad. All the notes of that day consist of this one statement, "thanking God for the way I look... That just sounds like the weirdest thing." Well yeah, it sounds cocky and it sounds like I think of myself as divinely beautiful. Which, for someone who has battled with persistent self-image problems, is just not true. But that's not the point. We are all pretty; we don't have a choice and it's not an opinion. Made in the image of God, made in the image of beauty. So we're all beautiful? Okay... that's a lot to take in. But being thankful for how I look as an individual... scary, a legitimate thing to be thankful for and it doesn't make sense to me. But I guess that the beauty of it... to me anyway. haha cheesy
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