DATING MYSELF – 04

Looks aren’t everything.. right?

I’d be lying and I’m sure a lot of you would be too if we were to say that we don’t pay attention to looks when we’re first interested in someone. There are of course other and more important factors to consider in a possible suitor such as compatibility, respect, maturity and just someone who matches where you’re at altogether, however, looks are definitely on the list.

Attraction is a normal phenomenon and it exists in so many aspects of our lives outside of relationships and is totally fine. You wouldn’t buy a shirt that you thought was ugly would you? I don’t think so. But someone else might, because that shirt may be exactly what they’re into.

I think of it the same way for finding a partner. It isn’t that people are necessarily ugly or unattractive, they just might not be suitable for what you’re looking for or are into in this moment and that’s completely okay because they are right up someone else’s alley.

This topic brings me into this weeks Dating Myself post. I feel like if my goal is to fall in love with myself and boost my confidence, I need to focus on the aspects that I would actually be considering had I really been dating myself – my appearance.

Like I talked about last week, I’ve always struggled with compliments and thinking of my self in positive ways. I’ve always thought there were issues with my hair, or complexion, or skin, or weight or literally anything physical about me.

Looking back on old pictures, I would always kind of laugh at myself for thinking that that was fat, or that was bad hair, or that was bad skin etc because where I am now, it’s “worse”. I usually find that when I’m looking back on those pictures, I’m dissatisfied with how I look now and wish that I could look like I did back then – even though at that point, I was thinking the same thing about previous years.

This week i’m going to look into discovering how to appreciate what I have and who I am in the moment and disrupt this cycle of wanting to be my previous self. In loving who I am, my confidence level will increase, I will be more willing to try new things outside of my comfort zone, and the stress of worrying about what I look like will hopefully dissipate.

In order to start this journey of appreciating my appearance, I’m going to..

• Tell myself 1 thing that I like about my appearance every morning
  this could be something as simple as noticing one perfect ringlet in my mess of curls. The goal is to eventually be able to notice more major aspects of my appearance and to easily identify them as attractive.
  
• Discover my ideal *attainable* appearance and work towards achieving it
  it’s easy for me to want to change everything about my physical self and hope that it can be done tomorrow, but that’s extremely unreasonable and unhealthy. Instead, I’m going to pin point certain aspects of my appearance that I believe could use some improvement and create a concrete plan and stick to it.

• Nourish my body with good and healthy foods to boost my mental and physical health
  I think the easiest way to tackle this one would be to make it feel like I’m doing myself a favour in feeding it nutrition and delicious foods. Like I owe it to my body – which I do. I’m not saying that I won’t allow myself to eat junk food every now and again, but I’m going to build a better relationship with whole foods in order to build a better relationship with myself.

• Focus less on social media influencers and their beauty and dream bodies
  social media is a trap for me where I get sucked into all the gorgeous girls on instagram and Pinterest and wish that I could have a body like theirs to pull off that outfit, or that my hair was nice enough to make me look that pretty and on and on. This is draining in soo many ways and does so much worse than good.
  I said focus less in this bullet point as opposed to stop focusing altogether because I do find some benefits in admiring the influencers. When I notice features that I like, it pushes me to want to eat well and move my body in order to achieve my reality of their bodies. I know I won’t ever look like these models on instagram- since a lot of them don’t even look that way in real life- but I can use them as inspiration to reach my goals and that’s a plus for me.

None of this will happen over night and I’m 100% okay with it. It’s called a journey for a reason, there will be lots of ups and downs and challenges along the way. I do believe though that I owe it to myself to start this journey and quit putting it off waiting for “the perfect time”. The “perfect time” is now and I’ve wasted too many years not loving myself, I can’t afford to waste anymore.

J