What is Beauty?

                                      
    Hello, guess what? The Mayans were wrong, which is  spectacular depending on who you ask. I just recently read an article on The Frisky titled "Mirror, Mirror: You ARE Pretty Enough to Find Love". It is all about accepting yourself and not worrying about being "beautiful" because there is a type of love for everyone. You know, all the stuff our elders try to teach us. However, I have been reading Iyanla Vanzant's book "One Day My Soul Just Opened Up" and it is a daily self-help book that is meant to be read in 40 days. I am on my sixth day, and the day is titled Creativity.I don't want to give you too much details, but   in this chapter I learned that I can always change my mind.

         I have always had a very negative way of thinking, maybe I inherited that from my dad. Anyway, this negative thinking stems mostly from my physical looks. You see I have sickle-cell anemia, which is a serious illness. It  can cause me to get physically weak,  have excruciating pain and has caused me to spend most nights in the hospital as a child.

      Besides the frequent hospitalizations I received, I had a creepy,green, slimy appearance that used to make me shudder whenever I saw it. It was in the whites of my eyes, you know, the ones that people first notice in other and it's called jaundice. Jaundice appeared right in middle school ( not a good place to start), and I remembered the guy I had a crush on back then make fun of my  eyes and it caused me to cry severely in front of him. I also remembered  in my last years of high school some kid would always ask me if I had drugs. It wasn't in a nice way, but very harsh and taunting. Those weren't the only two, for other followed suit and made sure I always new my eyes were a yellow greenish color.

                                    
      I never understood why people made fun of me, I was shy (still am)  but very nice to others. However, in those years of bullying I stood up for myself once, which resulted in a fight. But other times I just stood there taking my parents advice, which was ignoring them, but it did not help at all. So I thought that I soon as a graduated from high school that there would be more mature people and bullying will have no avail.

     I was wrong in fact the first year of college was spent worrying about what others were thinking of me. I still get teased and bullied, in fact the other day I was at Walmart and someone busted out laughing saying that "I look like a stick" . But guess what? It doesn't bother me now. Because I have a positive mind that loves every inch of me. It's hard, and it is not overnight that you will wake up loving yourself like that. I still struggle from time to time, but I just pray to God to hinder my negative thoughts and to love everyone instead of hating everyone and everything like before, and it helps.