#35 Days of Dares #20 Dare to Be Real
Sometimes I feel like I don’t fit.
I feel uncomfortable in my own skin.
Why can’t I be like that writer?
Why can’t I look like her?
I wish I could think like him.
I’m learning to that to just be myself, to be real, is enough. I may have different, quirky thoughts and may not conform to everyone’s idea of who I should be, but I am me—created to be the unique person I am and to contribute to the world in the unique way I was destined to.
E.E. Cummings put it like this: To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight- and never stop fighting.
Instead of trying to be someone else’s idea of perfect, or even the perfect me I sometimes fantasise about, I’m going to be the imperfect me—and that’s okay. In fact, that’s just perfect.
My husband once said to me, ‘You’re so beautiful.’
‘No I’m not,’ I said, brushing him away like an annoying fly.
‘You are. I look at you through Elaine-coloured glasses and you’re beautiful.’
What can you say to that? That throwaway line has stuck with me for years and I wrote about it in my first book Beautiful: beauty tips for the soul.
In my favourite children’s book of all time, The Velveteen Rabbit., the message is one that being real is beautiful, worthy and valuable.
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. Margery Williams
We are our best when we are real. Dare To Be Real
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