“Don't lose who you are in the blur of the stars!
Seeing is deceiving, dreaming is believing,
It's okay not to be okay.
Sometimes it's hard to follow your heart.
Tears don't mean you're losing, everybody's bruising,
Just be true to who you are!”
-“Who You Are” by Jessie J

It was past 6:00 in the evening, her work should’ve been finished for the day but it’s not. She should have been working out already, but she’s not. She looked to her right, where her mirror was hanging, and there she saw a round face with chubby cheeks, chunky arms and flabby stomach. Her eyes were drooping with sadness and her emotions were screaming through the mirror, telling her how disgusted she was of what she was seeing. Though she was supposed to finish her work, she immediately stood up and changed to her work out clothes. 

She then laid down her yoga mat, tied her hair up, drank a glass of water and played one of her chosen workout videos for the day. She paused for a while in between those videos that she selected and during those pauses her hands kept shaking, she was having cold sweats, she was feeling a bit lightheaded like she was going to collapse anytime. She didn’t mind those and insisted that she should finish her workout because she hated what she just saw on the mirror. 

After finishing all the videos that she has planned to do, her heart was suddenly beating faster than it should have. She should have been approaching her resting heart rate by then because she had just finished her cooling down routine. But it was even twice as fast as her heart rate during her cardio workouts. She stopped moving and just laid down on her mat, trying to breathe slowly and trying to calm herself while tears were running down from her round eyes. She tried to clear her head to stop whatever’s triggering her palpitations. She was scared. She was frustrated. She was feeling anxious about what she saw on the mirror. She was hurt by her own judgement. She was vulnerable. And she cried even harder.

A few moments later, she stopped crying. She sat down and browsed through her photos. She was unintentionally bringing more judgements into her head. A text message came in, it was from a person she loves deeply. “Whatever it is that your heart desires, I will be here to support you and have your back because that’s all I can do for you. But always remember that my love for you was never brought by any physical attraction. It was the mental and emotional attraction that led us to where we are now. And that will never change no matter how much weight you gain or how much wrinkles your skin may get. I loved you, I still do, and I always will”. Tears began to fall from her eyes once again. But this time, it was out of happiness.

Our world has been fixated so much on certain norms that the society has created. And these are being fed to us constantly through social media. Unfortunately, social media has evolved from being a platform for expressing freedom and creativity to being a source of unrealistic expectations and unruly judgements. At this point of our lives, may this serve as a reminder to us, a wakeup call, that our world should never dictate our worth. As Malcolm X once said, “We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.”.

If you’ve made it to this part of my post, then I would like to express how grateful I am for the time and effort that you have allotted to read this. This may or may not be of your interest, but I hope that I have made you realize a few things. I hope to talk to you again on my next post. Take care! :)