Pretty is pretty is pretty is

I look in the mirror and I am so certain that something isn’t right.
I have pock marks of red and faded acne across my cheek. I don’t cover it up with makeup because it feels like a lie. This is who I am. Flawed. Pretty ish. Pretty with reservations.

I dance in the mirror and the joy I feel bubbling up from the music and the movement gets stifled by my brain that watches the skin around my stomach wiggle and I am ashamed. I am ashamed that I have not figured out how to contain myself in the way so many seem to have.

I don’t want to just be thin. I’ve learned better than that. I grew up always around athletes, my active adventurous parents, have felt the rush of sore muscles and heady breaths. I have always wanted to be strong. Strong and alive.

But the pull to be conventionally beautiful, to fit the standard, the mold of our current world, sucks me in and tries to shove me away from myself. My inside self.

Because my inside self knows things my brain doesn’t. And my brain can’t allow that if we’re going to try to be accepted. It thinks.

My inside self tries to call out to me. It does. I can hear it now that its gotten quiet and I lay on the floor on my stomach, my heartbeat pulsing through it like a jellyfish.

It’s very quiet. It’s gentle. It says, look at yourself. Look at yourself in the mirror.
No.
Really look.
You’re not the outside. Do you see it yet? Your soul pours out through your eyes, your aura shimmers around the skin you’re working so hard to fix. You are whole and steady. You are just light and air and water.

Your body is holding you up, holding you together. Holding together the light and air and water so that you can speak and weave beautiful pictures with strangers, so that you can dance with the sunlight and brighten hearts, so that you can leap into someones arms and hug them with your heart through your arms, through your body that is ready to hold you. Ready to contain your essence like a smoking perfume bottle, touching everyone it can sense.

with joy and confetti,

Alexa