So lately, I’ve decided that I need to be more comfortable in my skin. That I need to love myself and my body the way it is. I see all these young girls, who look great, worrying about their weight. I don’t want Alanna to be that girl when she grows up. I want her to be happy with how she looks. She is gorgeous. This means I need to set the example. I need to embrace my body, no matter what. I do have a horrible self image, but I am working at changing this. Every time I look in the mirror, I criticize what I see. I’ll tell myself horrible things and then when I’m on the verge of tears, I tell myself the suck it up. I’ve always hated how I looked. I’ve never felt very pretty. And when I do feel pretty, it’s only temporary and is gone as quickly as it came. I blame society for its skewed vision of what “perfection” is. A woman is perfect as she is. No matter how she looks. She is a human being and thus perfect.

To help Alanna, I have decided words such as “fat”, “chunky”, “thick”, “gorda”, and anything else that is negative, shall not be used around her. I don’t use those words to describe people anymore either. No more mean jokes. I have people in my family who think they are fat or ugly and I hate that they feel this way about themselves. Any jokes I would make would only be negative towards someone else. Putting someone else down. How would I like it if people were doing that to my family members? I wouldn’t and neither would you. I just don’t want to make fun of people. It’s not nice and all it does is send more negative energy out into the world. The world needs more positive energy, but if we continue to treat people horribly and talk down to them, then this will never happen.

I think Alanna has been the one to bring about most of this change, if not all of it. When I see people in public, I have an out of body experience and I try to image what they may deal with on a daily basis. Surely, some of them have the same worries and concerns I do. I am courteous to others, because I would want them to be courteous to me. It’s funny how this is a cardinal rule that almost no one obeys anymore. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. Not in this world. With technology being how it is, it’s very easy to say what you want and put others down. You never see the faces of these anonymous screen names, so you don’t think of the consequences. This may all sound like I’m rambling, and it could be true, I do that a lot, but let me try and bring this back around to my first paragraph to make sense.

Respect. Self love. Compassion. These are traits I wish to teach Alanna. I feel the younger generation has lost its way among the busy Internet highway and forgotten what humanity is like. I know, I know, how can I preach on my soapbox when I too, am on the interwebs posting this? Well, the best way to get any message across is to post it where the busiest place is. Hello Internet. And I don’t care if anyone actually reads this, sure it would be nice, but I do this to cleanse my own soul. And if someone does read it, and they become inspired in anyway, then I’ve done a good job in the world.

So until my next ramble session, please stop and think before you do or say anything, it could be the most important thing you do for someone else.

❤