Life Isn't A Magazine: You Need To Realize Your Flaws Are What Make You Beautiful
Your freckled back. Your bumped nose. Your small boobs. Your huge boobs. Your flat ass. Your donky ass. Your big lips, your thin lips, your tree trunk legs, your big feet. That stupid mark on your thigh that looks just like George Washington.
We all have them: flaws. We wear them like scars, trying to hide behind them, covering them over with makeup and high collars. We live our lives working out ways to hide them from the outside world, without ever really letting them see light.
We silently condemn them, wishing they would go away, assuming that if we didn’t have them anymore, we'd be perfect, and then we could be happy. But what are flaws, really? The simple answer to that is this: Anything that is different from what media outlets have led you to believe is perfect. They are anything that deviates from obtaining similarity to the tight models in their airbrushed catalogues, who most likely came into the shoot with a few zits and moles removed.
But what are models, really? They are nothing more than flawed human beings undergoing a transformation for a magazine to make you believe there’s some standard of beauty, but trust me, they have flaws, too. How do I know this? Because it’s the flaws that make you beautiful and the most famous ones always had something just a “little bit wrong with them.”
Think about it: Laura Stone with her gapped teeth. Kate Moss for her less than average “model height.” Cindy Crawford with her mole on her lip. What society has come to deem as beautiful quirks and unique features are just flaws that models decided not to hide, or more importantly, what some photographer actually understood as the most beautiful part of them and relished it.
Those big-name models are famous for a reason, and I know that because I don’t follow models but I still know their names. I remember them because I see the beauty in their outlandish displays of photos upon photos thrown into the masses. I see what the photographer who took a chance on them saw: their imperfections and how they made them beautiful.
It’s time we stop hiding behind our flaws, wrapping our happiness up in them, assuming that if we didn’t have them that would make us better. If you didn’t have those flaws, who would you be? Just an airbrushed model who isn’t even real. You’d be a clone. A fake-ass person with nothing unique, nothing charming, nothing that’s just you.
Your flaws are who you are, and the more you hide them away, the more you hide yourself against the world. Your flaws are what makes you the individual you are. The sooner you start realizing that your flaws are what make you beautiful, the sooner we can stop calling them flaws.
Photo via We Heart It
