Love Yourself Girl!

There is a fine line between being confident and conceited that can be very difficult to determine in today’s world.

We start off as children who don’t care about what anyone thinks of our ideas and fantasies. As we get older, insecurity sets in. We start to care about what our friends, family and strangers think of us.

This is the point from which we must build ourselves up.

For women, external factors affecting our quest for confidence seem determined in setting us back.

This is why any and all efforts to dismantle these obstacles are deemed as “protests.”

In reality, women are merely jumping over hurdles placed in front of us.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes confidence as “a feeling or consciousness of one’s powers or of reliance on one’s circumstances.” It defines conceited as “having or showing an excessively high opinion of oneself.”

When speaking of a state of being, we have to work our way up to become the person with the potential that we already garner. In a world that tells us to “fake it ’til you make it,” one of the steps to reaching confidence is dipping your feet into that state of conceitedness.

To further get into what being conceited means, we’ll take Amy Schumer’s new movie, “I Feel Pretty,” as an example. “I Feel Pretty” has been criticized for being another “makeover movie.” In this film, Amy Schumer’s character, Renee Bennett, hits her head during a spinning class and believes she has transformed into a supermodel-esque woman. The twist is that she looks exactly the same but her view of herself makes her a happier, fearless woman. She begins to take chances that she believed she wasn’t pretty enough to take.

Jennifer Wright of The New York Post writes:

according to a 2016 study by Dove, 85 percent of women say they opt out of ‘important life activities’ when they don’t feel good about their looks.

‘I Feel Pretty’ is not ideal on a lot of levels. The fact that Schumer’s character recites a heartfelt speech in praise of a cosmetics line, an industry that capitalizes on women’s insecurities, feels absurd.

But the film does tackle how women’s insecurity over physical appearance limits them when it comes to going after what makes them happy — whether it’s a job, a boyfriend or even eating something high in calories.

I would like to add that this is much like our own mental transformation. Maybe we love our eyes but overdraw our lips. Maybe we wanted plastic surgery in the past then learned to accept ourselves. Maybe we still want plastic surgery. We may have many negative thoughts about ourselves and fighting those thoughts can be difficult in many cases. The point is that whatever you do love about yourself should never be condemned. It is completely okay to draw attention to what you love about yourself. You can even use your strong foundations to build someone else up. Try being conceited for one day. Start looking at other women with the same love you give yourself. It can really change you.

John Berger’s essay on art criticism, Ways of Seeing, uses “Vanity” by Hans Momling (above) to describe how:

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

That’s why women should have their cake, eat it and flaunt all of their positive self-love.

Any type of self-love a woman has for herself is a powerful force to be reckoned with because they’ve had to fight to maintain it. It is a physical and mental battle every single day. Don’t be afraid to be proud whenever you win.