Blog

Beautifully made. Dealing with insecurities.

Happy weekend. My week was blissful. Hope you enjoyed yours too. Thank you so much for the feedback on the previous post, it meant a lot to me. If you haven’t read yet, kindly do justice to it after you finish reading this post. As requested, I am gonna delve more into the concept of love.

Let’s talk about self-love.

The concept of self-love is very broad and cannot be exhausted completely in a single post but I will try and narrow into a few aspects.

“Self-love is a state of appreciation for oneself that grows from actions that support our physical, psychological and spiritual growth” – Google.

In my part of the world, people normally struggle to accept who they are, they are dealing with insecurities with especially their physique and appearance and get obsessed about it.

Thoughts of self-love bring Cindy Kwarteng Dadzie to mind. If anyone thought me about self-love in practicality, she is definitely the one.

Cindy is a strong-willed lady who knows how and when to say no, she acts on her needs rather than her wants and is very intentional about herself (keen characteristics of self-love). Trust me when I say she is the epitome of self-confidence.

Funnily, that wasn’t always her story.

I met her some years ago and all I could do was wonder why this lady never laughed and in a weird way, hid her face or covered her mouth when she talked. I later realized she had broken enamel. Telling me about her story, she recalled how she woke up in the hospital one afternoon with part of her teeth gone after she fainted unexpectedly.

“When my teeth got broken, I became angry and aggressive. I asked all the whys. I lost confidence in self and I tried as much as possible to avoid people. I couldn’t bring myself to open up my mouth and talk or laugh because that would expose my teeth. I was not born with it so it left me very insecure about my looks.”

How did you overcome that, I asked. “I realized that there was nothing I could do about it and had to embrace it and accept it as a part of me. For now, I am loving being the girl with the broken enamel. Learning to accept this helped me to be so intentional with myself and I can’t stop loving me. I realized people got to love that part of me when I loved it too”.

Self-love goes beyond just accepting how we look (and we will talk about those too) but it is a very important factor to attaining self-love.

Dear brother, Why do you want to redden your lips or become fairer? Dear sister, why are you wearing those hip popping, butt popping materials? Do you wear your make-up because you feel insecure about your real face?

Most of us have something in our appearance we don’t like — your nose, an uneven smile, flat buttocks, height, etc. And it’s absolutely normal to worry or fret about it sometime but if it becomes something that preoccupies you and you are so conscious of it for most of the day, studies show it can be symptoms of a mental disorder known as the body dysmorphic disorder.

You may miss work or school, avoid social situations or isolate yourself from family and friends in order to hide your flaw. You might want to seek help if this feeling of self resonates with you.

Help includes praying to God about it and seeking counseling.
When God created you, he said, I have made nobody like her and I am so proud. He said, “it is good”. You were perfectly and wonderfully made and how you look is definitely not a mistake.

It’s good to want to enhance how you look but before that, learn to accept and glory in how you look now. People will accept you when you learn to accept yourself.  To anyone dealing with insecurities, embrace your uniqueness and slay with it, whether circumstances caused it or God made you so. Be like Cindy and slay boldly. Till next time, stay blessed.

xoxo,
Afiya

Don’t forget to leave a comment and like.

Also, Cindy is a fashion blogger, she is redefining fashion God’s way. Give her a follow on Instagram @theadjoadadzie and visit her blog too, details are on her IG page.