I Love Myself for the First Time in My Life

I’m beautiful because even though I might not believe I can at first I still try, even though I struggle to see that I’m beautiful I encourage others to believe they are, and even though I sometimes don’t think I’m good enough I push through anyway.

I love me because I’m persistent, I continue, and I’m learning.  I love me because although things have been difficult, I still have a vision and I still want to pursue it.

It wasn’t until a year after I did this project, a project where I walked around and asked various women why they loved themselves and found themselves beautiful, that I realized I do love myself and find myself beautiful. Before, I didn’t know why I thought I was beautiful or if I had any reason to love myself.  I was only concerned about the women I asked.  I wanted them to realize for that split second, the few minutes that we shared, to think, and to write down why they were beautiful.  I was focused on them and not on me.  I didn’t think I mattered.  How I thought about myself didn’t matter. I don’t think I found myself beautiful at all previous this realization.

This poster is what I looked at every day in my room at school for the last semester of my senior year.  It motivated me to figure out why I would love myself or find myself beautiful.  However, I found it difficult to pinpoint the reasons.

After I graduated I brought the poster home and placed in on my sister’s side of our room, parallel to my bed where I could face it and see it every day.

Fast forward to last weekend where I found the Dr.Pepper Tuition Giveaway Competiton.  Unlike me, I joined the competition and the first step was to write a goal I have to save the world and explain it.  Of course, it took me some time to think about exactly what I wanted to say, but here is what I said:

It took a day after when I was trying to accumulate votes to be able to upload a video, that I realized then that I wanted to expand SparklyWarTanks into an actual thing.  Dr. Pepper helped me to see why I’m beautiful.  It helped me to realized what I wanted to do with my life.  How I want to impact the lives of others and why this is so important to me. I want to change how women see themselves and communicate their perspective and understanding to others through their culture, ideologies, and values.

I don’t want other women to feel like me.  Where the first 21 years of my life I didn’t love myself or find myself beautiful.  I don’t want women to look and confide in outside things to make them happy.  I don’t want women to drown in their own societal expectations and obligations and not be able to give one reason why they are amazing, worthy, and able.  I saw SparklyWarTanks bigger.

Now this is my vision to make this, what I’m doing, bigger.  I want to help.

I never felt like this before, ready to save the world.  I hope I can make this something, something huge, something that can really influence the spread of self-love.