Not that you necessarily needed more relationship advice...

Oh Monday, where should I start with you? I could start by talkingj about lying to yourself…or possibly lying to everyone else? I could discuss unhealthy relationships, really bad drivers or learning to calm yourself. Oh my so much to talk about and so little time to type it all. That and I don’t want you to stay glued to the computer screen for an hour because I’m just that interesting and all. I wish, right? Well I will gladly accept the 10 minutes you take out of your day to read my words and I hope it serves as either something helpful or a form of amusement. Either way I’m happy.

Bad drivers and trying to calm yourself is actually more of a description of my drive home last night and even though I could talk about it for a good 20 minutes I know that none of you really care, and I am totally okay with that! So on to the real subject at hand….

“You can’t stop lying to everyone else until first you stop lying to yourself.” –Kayla Davis

I can be so quote worthy on occasions. I have spent a lot of time the last week thinking about life and the way people tend to depict it to the outside world. We have these ideas in our heads of what is socially acceptable and what we should portray as happiness but the truth is we all look absolutely obnoxious. I have said this one million times, no one’s life is perfect. That doesn’t mean I want to hear how terrible your life is, that is just tacky and I don’t do the whole self pity thing. I just want people to be aware of the fact that just because you say things are perfect, the rest of the world knows that you’re full of it. No relationship is flawless, no one is happy with their partner 100% of the time. That’s just reality. News flash, if you think you’re going to go the rest of your life without fighting with your spouse you’re deep, deep in the dark so deep in fact that at this point harnessing the powers of the sun in your very own hands couldn’t help you. The truth is that we’re human, we all make mistakes and at some point we’ll all be in the dog house for a little bit. Now, what I am sincerely concerned about are people who actually think their life is perfect. I figure if you say something so many times you just start to believe it and I’ve often heard that ignorance is bliss. Well what happens when one day those people wake up and realize they’ve just gone from living in a fairy tale to living in a horror story? You were so blinded by your hallmark image of your marriage that you missed the point where your Husband started sleeping with the babysitter and now he’s leaving you. That must feel like falling from the sky to rock bottom. Ouch. However, a realistic person would have noted changes in the relationship and would have been easing themselves into the fall; it would still hurt but they’d get out with a few broken bones versus a fatal head injury. Don’t make excuses for someone just to make your life seem like there’s nothing wrong, you need to take control of problems not be complacent as they slip by and eat away at your mental state. Making the person take responsibility for their own actions will get you a lot further in the long run. I’m not trying to down play happiness here in the least bit, I know there are times when life feels absolutely perfect. But perfect moments are real; they are something that in that moment is indeed flawless. But minutes versus a constant are two different things. Life is full of ups and downs but life is never one steady line, unless of course you’re dead. I can remember a few months ago I was in my nice warm bathtub with the lights dimmed, jets on, The Fray playing softly through speakers, my beautiful new mural elegantly gracing the wall in front of me and my Husbands arms wrapped around me securely. In that moment I actually thought my heart was going to explode and I was going to die of happiness. If I felt like that all the time…I think I would be numb to the rest of the world, actually. The part of the frame you’re not seeing is that I spent the day bickering at him and frustrated but it made unwinding with him that much more beautiful. If we pretend things are perfect, we ignore the real problems and in doing so we set ourselves up for failure. If we admit to ourselves we have problems and don’t ignore them openly then we can build a foundation on more than just an image. When it all draws to an end we are not Polaroid’s, we will change and we will fade and the only thing we will have left is the love for each other so instead of worrying about how everyone else perceives your relationship why not spend time on how you legitimately perceive it yourself.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

This is most definitely true, there is not one person in this world that someone, somewhere doesn’t find attractive. We all have different tastes and preferences, some of us have none at all. This week I have seen two rather interesting examples of people and size discrimination, one being a photo Victoria Secret posted to their Facebook page of a model in a pair of undies and another being a repost by a friend of a plus size model who was also rather scantily clad. Both grown women, both having brunette hair, both in my eyes absolutely beautiful.

Obviously my opinion was far off from many users of the social networking site. You see when any idiot can hide behind a little icon with a picture of an inanimate object in it they tend to be the first to throw stones, after all who’s going to do anything to them? It’s just the internet. If I could throw that cucumber in their picture right at their hateful presumably ugly face I would. Below the picture of the Vicky S model, the comments were just awful. Comments ranged from “go eat a burger” to “she has to be anorexic” and of course there were people calling her “beautiful” and “sexy” also, but the arguments raged amongst the commenters who were spouting out things such as “you’re just jealous” to “ this is why girls develop eating disorders, they have to live up to America’s standards.” It was all one giant mess. I commented, of course and although it was full of wisdom one thing I learned years ago is that no matter how powerful simple logic is there will always be people out there too obnoxious to even begin to absorb it. As I scrolled through the 1000 comments I couldn’t help but get angry. No one and I mean absolutely NO ONE has any room to criticize another human being for their appearance. No one is picture perfect, models are not even picture perfect, every time you’re looking at a magazine full of perfectly shaped breasts and toned tummies I want you to thank Photoshop for its wonders and abilities. So this poor girl, who could possibly be the sweetest person in the world, is being criticized for looking too thin when in reality she’s probably not THAT small, it’s whatever sales. In this case you’re broadcasting a picture to millions of people and as I said earlier, haters love to hate. So as if seeing a skinny girl being torn down wasn’t bad enough I had a friend post a picture of a plus sized model with a story attached about a sign in a gym asking if this summer gym goers want to be “whales or mermaids”. Well I for one plan to be human this summer but that’s just me. The story was sweet and I understand where whomever wrote it was coming from even though it did do slightly what it was defending against. It compared Whales to Mermaids, whales (larger women) getting the upper hand while mermaids (smaller women) were said to have had personality disorders and have nothing appealing beyond the skin pretty much. Well as you can imagine the comments on this original picture were just as harsh as the ones on the Victoria Secret post. She was called things from “Fatty” (Oh I bet that one cut deep, now please return to your desk and continue coloring, little Timmy!) to actually being referred to as a Whale. It is completely beyond me why anyone would feel hateful things necessary to even say in either case. We all have opinions but some should definitely never make it past our cranium.

What didn’t so much surprise me is it seemed a lot of the judgment was coming from men. Oh men, you are all so perfect none of you are too fat or too skinny, too ugly or too stupid. But women, please refer to us indirectly every chance you get as one of the above. Now obviously not every man is like this, I actually personally know very few that are and that’s because I would never associate with a pompous asshole. However, there were women being just as nasty as the men. Women that I am sure would be hurt if someone judged them just as they were judging these girls.

The truth is no matter how hard you try someone out there is going to tell you you’re not good enough. I for one have been told I am too thin and I have seen women who are perfectly healthy be told they are too thick. You know what I have to say to those people who say such things? Shut your judgmental, foul, uneducated, inconsiderate mouth. Everyone has beauty in them, no matter how large or how thin. There are occasions when you are LEGITIMTELY concerned with someone’s health that it’s okay to say, “Hey, I really don’t want to see you hurt yourself, please let’s get some help.” But telling her she looks like she’s eating too much or too little is no one’s business but hers and as long as SHE feels beautiful and of course healthy then that’s all that matters. Women are all built different for different reasons; we are all unique in our own wonderful ways. Just because you don’t find someone attractive does not mean that they are not perfect in someone else’s eyes. I don’t care if you’re a size 0 or a size 16, you indeed are beautiful because you were put on this earth as a capable woman. You have hips that were meant to bore children, breasts that were meant to feed them and compassion which was meant to nurture them. No matter what anyone says or thinks, that’s what makes you beautiful, the fact that you have a pecial purpose that no man nor woman can change. How can someone not find beauty in that? How can anyone think that something built so specifically is unattractive?

So my Dear friends, I leave you with this: You are absolutely beautiful, in every single way. No matter how you think others feel about you or what they say remember this, that the most beautiful part of us is our soul, our personality, the radiance of our smiles and as long as you are confident in yourself you are invincible. Those who judge others based on their outer shell are indeed very rotten people inside and no matter how attractive they think themselves on the outside NO ONE likes an apple with a rotten core.