Sorry its been a while since I've last posted. This blog is going to probably be my most personal blog. I want to write this in order to help other females (maybe males too) who are going through what I'm going to discuss.
Low self-esteem. Something which most (if not all) women go through at some point in their lives. Even females who are deemed as attractive by societies standards suffer from low self esteem. We live in a society where us females are constantly being judged by how we look. We are also bombarded by the media about what an attractive woman is. Because many of us do not fit society's standards of what being attractive is, we do what we can to appear more attractive. Look at the beauty industry, it is worth BILLIONS, we spend so much on products to make us look more attractive. It is like we are striving to look "perfect" like these fake models. If you look at magazine covers you see women who are blemish free, stretch mark free, perfect skin, flat abs, toned body. You never see any flaws because they have all been removed by photoshop. We see that as the standard of beauty but this standard of beauty is unobtainable because this "perfect looking woman" does not exist. ALL women have flaws because we are human beings not dolls.
I'm going to tell you my story which I've never spoken to anyone about, not even my closest friends of family. I never had self esteem issues until I was about 12/13 years old. Prior to that I didn't see anything wrong with how I looked. It is when I got to secondary school I had experienced negative comments about how I look. My self esteem got so bad that I didn't like taking pictures and I hated looking in the mirror. I used to get very nervous walking past groups of boys because I thought they will look at me with disgust. When out with my friends they used to get far more attention from boys than I did. I believed I was ugly and I used to ask God why he didn't make me beautiful like he did for other females. I would get upset and think about the plastic surgery I would want to get. Being of west African origin with typical sub-saharan African features I used to wish that I had some white or even indian mix in me so my features would look less African. When I got older I started wearing make-up and it got to a point I wouldn't leave my house without it because I thought I didn't look attractive without it on.
I took my insecurities into my relationships and believed that no guy would seriously want me and that they would only want my body. I found it difficult to accept that a guy would find me attractive. Even when I received compliments from females saying that they wished they looked as good as me I couldn't understand why anybody would want to look anything like me. Funny enough when I used to pretend I was confident with high self-esteem I started attracting a lot of guys, this shows that guys are also attracted to a woman that is confident. The downside of that is that I started to base my worth on the attention I got from guys. Unfortunately I see girls who think like this especially on social media with girls who always post half naked or provocative pictures in order to get likes and attention from men. Looking back, it is so upsetting that I once thought so negatively about myself. Now I'm in my mid 20s and I'm in a much better place, though I still get insecure occasionally.
Written by Dinah