And then I started thinking about how all of us, can at times, be particularly self-conscious when it comes to the way we look. Whether or not it's a long term feeling, just a phase or the occasional 'off day'. We've probably all at some point or other looked in the mirror and wanted to change something physical about ourselves. Myself included..
As a teenager I suffered with body dysmorphic disorder. I became fixated on something about myself that sounds sort of silly, but at the time my obsession felt like it ruled certain parts of my life. It at times stopped me from leaving the house and saw me spend probably what added up to be quite a few hours a day trying to correct the 'problem I believed I had'. In my eyes I was too pale and my lips were too red.. so I'd cover my lips in concealer or foundation as much as I could to try and take some of the color away, but this would make them dry and cracked and so I'd then pick at my lips - which would make them bleed. It was a downward spiral. And as trivial and small as it sounds now, in my head at that time, the 'problem' was much bigger.
Thankfully, this isn't something I do now and it isn't something that rules my life. In fact 97% of the time I wear nothing on my lips at all and I manage to feel totally confident and completely happy as my bare-lipped self - the total opposite to how I spent my teenage years feeling. I also stopped self-tanning a few years back and have never allowed myself to spend so much time and energy focusing on how I look physically since.
It did take a few years but I managed to achieve this by realising firstly that life was way too short to be so obsessed by what color my skin and lips were. I realised secondly that other people weren't seeing what I was seeing. My view of myself was distorted and I was being incredibly harsh towards myself for what was no actual reason. I asked myself who I was trying to impress.. I had a boyfriend (now Husband) who'd been with me for years and who told me how beautiful I was everyday. I wasn't sure why I wouldn't listen to the one person I trusted more than anyone else. I'd become so obsessed about something that was, in reality, nothing and had blown it up in my head.
In time I managed to stop concealing and picking at my lips all together. I had to be brave, though inside I felt insecure. One day, bare-lipped at what was my place of work at the time, I was stopped by a male co-worker who looking at my face said... "Wow, I hadn't realised how white your teeth are! You have such a lovely smile!". It was then that I suddenly realised that I'd fixated and obsessed about how I thought I looked with bare lips but in doing so I'd completely dismissed anything good about myself. I'd completely ignored the fact that there were parts of me that I did like and those parts should have been what I had focused my energy on, not the 'bad' parts.
Many years have now passed and I grew up and I realised that we tend to all want what we don't have. I also realised that one persons perception of beautiful is different to the next persons and that we tend to focus on the 'bad' rather than the 'good'.
I still prefer to wear a nude lip color on my lips for special occasions but I don't let it rule my life anymore.
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