I am beautiful just the way I am
The first time I considered that I could be beautiful, I was listening to Alessia Cara. Prior to that time, I didn't fancy the face that stared back at me from the mirror. I wouldn't say I liked the fact that I was chocolate brown or the fact that I had a high forehead and a small round nose perched on my face as if dropped as an afterthought. I didn't like the tiny curls on my eyelids, most people I thought beautiful had straight, long lashes. It wasn't just my face, it was the entire physique that made me up. I wasn't comfortable with it.
Source
When I gained a scholarship to study French for the entire summer of 2015, it was about 2 weeks before my 14th birthday. When I walked into my class for the first time, I saw kids who were well-fed, well-bred, beautiful, chubby, and tall for their age. I was the oldest yet smallest kid in that particular class.
When I found out that 90% of the class was either 11 or 12 years old, I drooped my head in shame. When it was time to celebrate my birthday, I told everyone I was turning 12 and no one protested. I was that petite.
Growing up with the file that I was "Not beautiful, short and small" instilled in my brain, I never struggled for physical attention. All my attention-seeking was done with my brain. So when my mates were taking special care to apply lotion to their bodies or drag their skirts up to their navels so they could reveal their smooth, long legs, I was busy burying my nose in either a novel or a textbook.
I told myself that what I didn't have in beauty, I could make up for with brains, and I did. I paid so much attention to my studies and my stories, creating the perfect girl in them, the girl I thought I should have looked like.
So when I tapped on Alessia Cara's 'Scars to your beautiful' and she began her first verse with the sentence
"she just wants to be beautiful, she goes unnoticed…",
I knew why that first tear slipped down my cheek. She was literally describing the last 20 years of my life. I didn't think I had the courage to face the truth about my looks which I had surpressed all these years so I paused the song, rose to take deep breaths and pace like I always did when I was tensed or angry, then went back to play the song.
This time, I played from YouTube music so I could read each line of the lyrics as she sang.
It was the way she put it perfectly, there were no better words to describe what I had done to myself over the years than the words Alessia used. She said in the latter part of the first verse;
"Oh, she doesn't see the light that's shining, deeper than the eyes can find it, maybe we have made her blind, so she tries to cover up her pain..and cut her woes away…"
That was so me. All the while I was pretending not to care about being a 'hot chic', I was screaming for attention from the world.
I am creative, so I'm highly imaginative, which is why I sat down to imagine what kind of pain Alessia must have gone through before perfectly scripting this song. Or maybe it was someone she knew, but whatever inspired her, it could as well have been my fed-up guardian angel whispering the lyrics of my life into her ears.
After listening to that song that day, I got all emotional and went back to the mirror to stare at my swollen reddened eyes, which someone had once said had 'pre-orbital dark circles' around them, whatever that meant, and tried to convince myself they were beautiful.
As I think on that day now, I can't help dropping this piece to laugh. Alessia Cara's song didn't make me realize my beauty, no, it first inserted a file different from the one that had been installed in my head. A file that suggested that beauty was beyond the outward appearance just as she sang in the second verse,
"...or that beauty goes deeper than the surface…".
When I grew older and someone made a snide remark about the fact that I was 5ft and a couple of inches, I would simply reply with "Lol. I know I'm short", I had normalized being talked down on to the extent that I did it to myself before someone else did it to me. So when I was turning 21 and my best friend, Treasure offered to make me up, I laughed and told her make-up didn't suit black people like me.
Treasure was another person who made me consider that I could actually be beautiful but that's a story for another day. If I ever get to see Alessia in person, I would want to give her a big, bear hug and whisper "Thank you" into her ears.
I still play that song today, that song that first made me go back to the mirror to stare critically at my facial features, hoping to discover beauty in them; "Scars to Your Beautiful" by Alessia Cara.
PS: Story inspired by "Scars to Your Beautiful" by Alessia Cara
I don't know if you are really referring to yourself in this story, but when I was a child and part of my adolescence I felt like that, and I began to love myself and to change things that I didn't even like.
I haven't listened to the song yet but it must be beautiful, but I do think that beauty goes beyond the physical and when we see it everything can change. I wish you a great day, greetings 🤗
No, it's fiction. But it's beautiful to know that you can relate. And I love the fact that you learned to love yourself too. I admire that 😍
Thank you so much for visiting and for contributing ❣️🔥
I wish you a great day too
Thank you @pravesh0 and @innerblocks for your support. I appreciate.
A fiction?! 🥹A touching and loving feel indeed. I believed it was nonfictional till you said otherwise, that's how good this was💕
Yes, it's fiction. I'm glad you loved it. Thank you, Whitney 😍😍
My pleasure dear💕
Alessia cara will always be one of my favorite singer, I love her songs a lot.
Now, this is an inspiration song. I love how you compose this, it is creative and emotional.
Amazing.
You are beautiful just the way you are.
Thank you so much for the appreciation, darling ☺️☺️
Literally singing that song in my head, for the past two days it has been on repeat playing nonstop. We are just beautiful they way we are. each person is unique.
Hehehehe.... The universe gossips 🙃