Your Wattpad Agony Aunt! (On hold)

You should read this

Hey guys, so this is something a little bit different. Hopefully it speaks to at least one of you.

I've also posted this on WWDMC but I'm not sure that I've the exact same audience, so I'll do it on both.

See the video attached! It's basically what inspired me to write this.

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We need to stop feeling that the only way we can accept ourselves is by relying on others - specifically guys - to make us feel accepted.

The truth is, we can never love ourselves if we don't love ourselves in the first place. We can't look to boyfriends and crushes to tell us that we're beautiful if we do not think it ourselves.

I think that girls today feel shitty about themselves because songs that say stuff like "you don't know you're beautiful, that's what makes you beautiful" make for a generation of girls who pretend to be so fucking insecure so that boys can come along and tell them otherwise - but the truth is, we'll pretend to be insecure for so long...that we'll actually start to believe it.

We look in the mirror and repeat to ourselves that we are ugly until we've eroded all sense of esteem we once possessed and hope that one day Prince Charming will make us love ourselves, as if he somehow has the ability to do that. We feel sad when we don't have a boyfriend because we think that that is the only way we can feel validated.

I can tell you that from personal experience, that's not true.

I rarely speak about myself and stuff so this feels really awkward, but I think I've vaguely mentioned this before. I used to struggle with self-image quite a bit, being so cruel to myself to the extent that I avoided being in pictures with friends, changing my hair a million times to try make myself look 'better', and just basically stopped being myself - my AWESOME FUCKING OPINIONATED self - for a couple years. And I would primarily blame all these insecurities on the fact that guys never liked me and shit. So when guys finally came along, I was too caught up in my insecurities to actually allow for anything to happen, to allow something out of it, and I'd always argue when they said I was beautiful and I'd continually refuse their compliments. The most ridiculous thing was, I hated when they gave up, when they stopped trying to tell me I was pretty and stuff. But seriously, what did I expect? How could they possibly convince me of something I didn't believe in myself?

Which is why one day I was just like you know what, fuck this shit. I told myself to just stop being annoying - tbh it was exhausting trying to be so negative - and I decided that I'm okay with myself.

(I mean, someone's got to own these killer legs ;))

And it was really funny because once I decided to be okay with myself, the next day some guy confessed to me that he liked me and I began getting messages from some other secret admirer(s). It was like the confessions just started pouring in almost immediately and...tbh, I was so confused/surprised/confrised.

(I know that's not a word).

I was like, hold on. Is it that they just came now or have they always been there and I was too blinded by my own insecurities to notice?

I learnt that it was the latter.

That I missed so many opportunities because I was clouded with this bane of insecurity; a cloud that had gotten so thick. My self-persuasion was so powerful that it blinded me.

At this moment, I can definitely say that I'm in a place where I don't think I'm particularly beautiful (I still don't think that everyone is beautiful, bite me), but I'm fucking comfortable with myself and I think that I'm someone definitely worth getting to know.

I'm not going to refuse people's compliments anymore. I'm not going to waste my energy trying to convince myself that I'm fugly, that I'm worthless, and all that shit. Because it's tiring and quite frankly, the world just becomes worse when you decide that you suck.

Someone else cannot define you, and neither can they be the validation that you seek. Only you can change your mind. Only you can convince yourself that you're beautiful. Because a guy will cannot do that for you, as much as the songs or the movies or the stories try to tell you. We need to stop looking to other people for validation, basing our own views of ourselves on the grounds of other people's actions and opinions.

Because you're just going to mess yourself up along the way.

You see, I'm not trying to say that boys can't make us happy and all that jazz. I'm trying to say that we are the authors of our own books. We are the painters of the canvas that is our life, and we can choose whether we want it to be plagued with only the black and grey -all the negative thoughts we have, saying we're ugly and worthless and shit - or the beautiful, vivid colours that we allow to shine through when we actually love ourselves. When we are actually comfortable with who we are, how we look.

The only confirmation I need is my own.

You are the only person who can convince you that you're beautiful.

That you're someone worth knowing.

Because you are. You just have to see it yourself.

#GenieInspiration

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Don't hesitate to share 'em.

Lots of love,

- genie_us xxxxxx

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