P E R C E P T I O N

They say be careful what you tell yourself because you are listening, but they never mentioned the contamination given from others. I've been thinking about perception a lot and I've found that we aren't what we are until we start believing it. I've been called fat since a young age and as I look at younger pictures I notice that I wasn't even fat until I started to internalize the "truths" others believed about me. What is truth really? Are our mirrors broken?

It seemed like the moment when I became fat positive, I began seeing how others were so quick to police me about what I chose to call myself even if it was in a positive manner. Looking back at my younger pictures, I noticed that I got my height a little quicker than some, but my weight was somewhat normal until the end of middle school. I noticed that the one thing I've never been called is ugly. I wonder if I would've internalized that too since our perception is so blurry.

People are constantly throwing insecurities at you for internalization. It's weird because when you begin to embrace who and what people think you are, here comes someone trying to tell you that's not who you are. This leads me to my next point. Who is anybody to tell you what they think you are? What gives another the right to think they have any input of who you are orcwho you have the ability to become. Who created this scale of beauty? How is it measured? Is this beauty scale just another massage to someone else's insecurities?

A few months back me and my cousins were talking. I believe I said something along the lines of how I was dark skin, but in a positive way. My cousins laughed and told me I wasn't dark skin and I sat confused because all my life that's what everybody said I was and who I perceived myself to be. Color is such a touchy subject and an even more sensitive subject in the black community. Color has never been sensitive for me, but I do acknowledge the sensitivity of it within my community. I start to realize how I now want to disassociate from my shell. I love my body and who I am, but I realize that I A M more. I realize that we all are more. We are more than the boxes and labels that people put us in.

Who I see myself as is no longer up for debate. Whether it be I'm too fat or not fat enough, outside opinions no longer matter.  I'll admit that they used to. We all look for acceptance at one time in my life. Opinions and the need for acceptance hasn't mattered to me in a long time and I feel so free. We have to learn to save boxes for our shells in death and stop letting this world world box us in with it's heavy insecurities. We are far greater than what people tell us and what some people's insecurities try to say we are. I don't think no one honestly knew they were ugly until somebody said they were and I also believe that's the same with extreme attractiveness. It's like our beauty goes through stages in this world and our features begin getting praised as trends. We are N O T trends. We are blueprints and we deserve to start acting as such. We are unshakable.