The Beauty of Me

At the beginning of last week, I felt very wronged. Why? It's because someone jokingly told me that she would feel humiliated if I had a boyfriend. I know, even though that was a joke, I already reached the stage where I would be easily affected by the statement. It wasn't her first time saying those kinds of things.

I spent more or less two days being so emotional about it... I was seriously considering to change myself into another person; a different me who would fit in and would actually attract a guy. I was seriously planning to pay her back for her words.

I consulted my friends about what was wrong from me and how could I change into a "better" me. Some of my friends showed me how I should dress and how I should behave. They told me the dos and don'ts of fashion. They criticized me for the way I look.

Well, I asked for it. I shouldn't complain.

However, I remembered some guy that told me I'm beautiful when I was dressing messily. If it was a joke, I wouldn't know... but one thing for sure, it was pleasant to hear such compliment.

Of course, my friends were confused having been told the compliment the guy gave me. "He said you're beautiful when you're dressed messily? How could it be?"

But my other friends told me that beauty is all about perspective.
Would a guy really attracted to me if I change myself and how I look?
Would I really be happy by changing myself?

Then I found this beautiful piece of writing by Paulo Coelho:

"We deny our own beauty because others can’t or won’t recognise it. Instead of accepting ourselves as we are, we try to imitate what we see around us. We try to be what other people think of as ‘pretty’ and, little by little, our soul fades, our will weakens, and all the potential we had to make the world a more beautiful place withers away. We forget that the world is what we imagine it to be.We stop being the moonlight and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it. Tomorrow, the water will evaporate in the sun. And all because, one day, someone said: ‘You are ugly.’ Or: ‘She is pretty.’ With those three simple words, they stole away all our self-confidence.

And we become ugly and embittered.

Manuscript found in Accra

(taken from Paulo Coelho's Facebook page" 

It really, really moved me. After all this time, I finally believe in my own beauty. That's all I got to say.

Thank you, Mr. Paulo Coelho for helping me to find my self-confidence again.