I never needed to become who others made me feel I should be

Picture got from Favim

Hey people,

I have wanted to blog about this for a while now, but I guess I always found a reason not to or did not really have the motivation it took to write it. I guess I do now.

Have you ever realised that some times we let certain factors stop us from being who we want to be and expressing ourselves the way we choose to?

Well, I noticed that a few months back when I realised that I had started wearing flats 98% of the time, I didn't really fancy the clothes I had and I didn't really feel all-so confident in them.

You see, I grew up with loads of high heels, I had heels while I was a kid (not too high) and the inches on the heels grew as I got older. I felt comfortable in heels. Flats were uncomfortable for me because I wasn't used to the feel of them, their shape and how my close my feet were in contact to the floor while wearing them. I also grew up wearing all sorts of fancy clothes. I went through phases and I wasn't really a fan of dresses, but as I got older (even before I was thirteen), I would wear elegant dresses and skirts and feel so beautiful and confident in what I was wearing.

In case some of you didn't know this, I was bullied for quite a significant amount of years and I guess that being bullied and also seeing people who were, for the lack of a better phrase, classified as the "popular kids," I tried to fit in with them in the area of fashion. Also, people had, in a way, made fun of me wearing heels and asking who I was getting all dressed up for and so on. So, I guess I started feeling like I was not supposed to wear heels and like I'll be better off just in flats (thinking about it now, maybe those girls just found heels way too painful or hard for them to walk in back then).



I moved out of my parents' house in 2013 and as I packed up my room, I left my boots, my gorgeous pair of red heels and other pairs of stilettos that I owned. I left with only 3 pairs of heels - the ones I wore to my prom, those I wore to my graduation and a pair of heels that I thought were pretty unique. Where could I wear those to? I also left behind a few dresses and only took along my graduation dress and a few designer dresses my dad had got for me not too long before then (individually too expensive to just leave behind). I went shopping and I bought a bunch or random things that I thought people would like.

You might be wondering what motivated me to write all this now. Well, I decided to go through a suitcase I had in our granary and donate most of the clothes I had in it because I hadn't worn them in at least a year (some, I hadn't worn in two years or more). As I went through the suitcase, I saw some outfits that made me actually think, "why would I ever wear this?" "this is SO not me" "why didn't people ever tell me this didn't look good?" and so on. After seeing the clothes that made me think about that, I pulled out a red dress my dad had got me, but I had never worn and then the Karen Millen dress I wore to my graduation (and another Karen Millen dress) and I was like, "when did I ever stop wearing these?"

This summer, I have been online looking for sophisticated and chic outfits in order to go back to m preferred look and it hasn't been the easiest thing for me to get back to. It is also really expensive to get back to because I not only need to buy clothes, but I need to buy shoes too.

What's the point of this post?

Well, I am writing this because we, as women, need to feel beautiful and not feel like we need to conform to what our peers want us to be. If we dress well and we look good and our peers are negative about it for whatever reason, we shouldn't let that get to us. I mean, some of those people who made me feel like I shouldn't dress the way I liked to are now dressing that way! Maybe some of them couldn't afford to back then or didn't have any of those outfits for some reason or another back then.

I regret ever switching my style. I regret the 600+ days that I have strictly worn flats because, although they are MUCH more comfortable to me now, I don't like them. I don't fancy how they look much and the variety of them seems less to me. I regret having only one pair of heels (the "unique" ones) that I could wear wherever if I actually chose to wear heels because I have worn out its top piece to the point that it's just a small, circular piece of metal under the heel now, it is very loud when I walk and my balance is a bit off because under my heel is not flat.

I regret all the days that I decided to stick to the image those people made me believe I needed to have in order to fit in. I regret using my chance to start afresh at a college in a county I was new to to try to keep to a "safe" image that was not me and frankly, was not even really the average image others had there. Was there even an average image? Everyone just wore what they wanted to when they wanted to and how they wanted to!

I am writing this to tell you to express yourself. Wear what you want to how and when you want to. Don't just wear something because you want attention from a guy or from your peers or you want a reaction from people. Wear what makes you feel good. Wear what you feel you would be comfortable speaking to a CEO of some company or royalty in although it is downright casual (or formal).

Beauty is a concept created by humans and what many of us consider to be beautiful now is from acquired knowledge. We should let our definition of beauty not be from acquired knowledge or shared knowledge, but be from personal knowledge. We should look in the mirror and not think, "people will think I look beautiful," but instead, we should say to ourselves, "I am beautiful." Ladies, you are beautiful and you do not need a bunch of people to tell you that. You do not need your peers to tell you that and you most definitely do not need a man to tell you or make you feel like you are beautiful because whether other tell you that you are or that you are not, hun', you are beautiful.

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"Some people will like you, some people won't, but if you be yourself the right people will love the real you."

"You are beautiful not by the standards of this world. You are beautiful simply because God made you in His image."