Labels:
Advice
What To Do When You're Feeling Unattractive
Do you ever get those days where you just feel unattractive and awkward and clumsy?
The sensation seems to be strangely divorced from the reality. No matter how much I look the mirror and objectively see that actually I look okay, as I stand there I just feel hideous. Unfortunately those days sometimes coincide with needing to dress up which then leads to me feeling like an ogre in a floral dress. Today was one of those days.
I don’t know what brings it on, I don’t know how to fix it. All I know is that from time to time I feel like the most hideous person alive and it seeps from me; I feel as if every bystander knows how much I hate myself at that moment in time.
So what can I do about it? If there’s one thing I’ve learnt it’s that further introspection helps neither man nor beast, especially when I feel like both. Staring at the mirror waiting to feel pretty is like staring at a treadmill and waiting to feel thin, it's just not going to happen.
Use distractions: Distractions can work wonders for making you feel better about yourself. I find when I laugh is when I feel at my best, even if that doesn’t mean my prettiest. So I try to find a way to get my giggle on, be it calling my best friend for a chinwag or remembering a really funny moment from my life recently.
Don't turn to social media: In the words of Baz Luhrmann ‘[it] will only make you feel ugly’. Okay so he was talking about beauty magazines but it totally applies here. As Julia Childs beautifully said “comparison is the thief of joy” and social media is pretty much a breeding ground for comparisons that will make you feel so much worse. Yes I did just use two quotes in one paragraph, but other people are more articulate than me okay?
Remember it will pass: We’ve all had moments of feeling like a pug (minus cute snuffling) and moments of feeling like Beyonce. Even if those Queen Bey moments are few and far between, just think about the time you felt like you could conquer the world. Especially if that feeling is more related to what you can achieve rather than how you look. We place far too much value on beauty in this little society of ours and I personally think we should value motivation and inspiration so much higher.
Gratitude: Oh that old attitude of gratitude thing again? Yes! Comparison is the thief of joy when you’re looking up not down. I have a family friend who is one of the most positive people I know, despite having a disability that makes life a lot harder for her. She is such an inspiration to me and reminds me to be happy about the little things. Sure I may feel unattractive, but I can run and that’s not something everyone can say.
I really hopes this helps anyone feeling the same way. I don’t want to place a high value on beauty, but nor do I want people to feel rubbish. So much of our attractiveness is about what is coming from within and someone who is happy and confident in themselves will radiate beauty, regardless of their universe-given features. So let’s all try to be a bit happier with ourselves shall we? Myself included.
Labels:
Lifestyle
Should We Ask Permission To Write About People?
What responsibility do we have when we write about other people? Should we ask their permission in the way we’re portraying them? Should we ask to include them at all?
This is a subject I first considered when writing about my twin, and since then it’s cropped up several times. I generally try to keep any comments about other people positive, because it’s nice to be nice and sometimes I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy…, but from time to time people may get portrayed in a slightly more negative light than they deserve in the interests of humour.
When I began wrestling with it I took to the world of the Google to hunt down an answer from more experienced bloggers and was flabbergasted to discover.. nothing. Nada. Not one bit of advice to help little old Liza navigate the uncertain seas of blogging. It’s a question I’ve seen floating around on Twitter so I know I’m not the only one thinking about it, but it seems that no one has yet put fingers to keyboard to dissect this ethical dilemma (or maybe I just hard rubbish search terms, which is entirely feasible) and so I thought I might as well take a stab at it.
What I sense, from my five fantastic months in the blogging world, is that there is no concrete answer. In my Google perusals I saw discussions surrounding traditional writing and the inclusion of friends and family members and the general consensus seems to be that asking is a pretty nice way to go about things. That way you seem to avoid some of the backlash that can come from an unfavourable portrayal, or at least provide something of a warning.
Ultimately people aren’t always going to be happy with what you have to say, and that’s the risk we take when we write things about our personal life. I never want to offend, but I do want to entertain and I’m going to be much more careful about the balance I strike for the ones I love. And just to clear, any advice I write on here is never based solely on one person, it’s a mishmash of previous experiences that have lead me to form opinions and advice surrounding that topic.
What do you think? Do you write about people you know?
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