The Truth About How We Feel About Ourselves

your body is a palace. your body is a palace. your body is a palace. 

I think I am in a war against myself, most of the day.

Do I head to the gym today?

Do I eat that slice of pie?

Do I walk out to that thing without make up?

Though the battles seem minuscule, they add up to become one big, messy war. We are constantly at war with ourselves, beating it, being mean to it, scarring it, and harming it. 

We want to win so bad, but winning is impossible when in order to win, we have to beat ourselves.

I know that this barely makes any sense. I know. But, I guess, the war we choose to fight with ourselves makes no sense either. Like, why would we want to fight ourselves and hurt ourselves in the first place? 

We live in a palace. A palace that we call our bodies, the bricks of our bodies made of gold and silver. The cells each manipulated to trace out the specific blueprints from our long line of history and roots. A breath of life blown into our bodies, the home for our soul and our mind. Someone thought meticulously, infinitely about the making of you. You weren’t just this random floating speck in the universe that someone was like, hey, okay, fuck it, lets make this speck of dust into some wobbly, pathetic, basic human being on Earth. No, someone actually sat down for decades, thinking of ways to show your beautiful, thinking of how to represent your beautiful in the way in which you would live your life. Someone crawled high and low in the universe to pick out every ingredient you are made of, sugar, spice, and everything that’s even more than just nice. Someone wrote the book to your life, a complete thriller, with highs and lows, happy endings and cliff hangers too. Someone thought about you so much, that he could feel the hair on your head growing in nanometers, which is 1/1000,000,000 of a meter, and could sob with his entire body whenever you had the slightest sadness looming in your heart. Someone put this exquisite, carefully thought-out, fragile, magnificently beautiful soul into this golden palace of a body. Your body. Your palace, worth more than anything you could ever imagine.

If we are living in a palace, why don’t we treat ourselves like kings and queens? Because there are people in this world that let us tell ourselves that we are just not quite good enough. Instead of seeing a palace, we see a shattered, worn-out shed, growing mold, and letting out unforeseen smells that nobody should ever smell in their lives. We let the bad guys invade our palace, take it over, and wreck who we are.

We try so hard to tear down our palace brick by brick and replace it with something better. But what could be better than gold, what could be better than what we already have?

I think we might be making a mistake, tearing ourselves down.

The truth about how we feel about ourselves can be summed up in one word, and that word is shame. Shameful about not being cool enough for people, shameful about not being quite pretty enough. Worst of all, what you’re most ashamed about yourself is that you even let yourself need these kinds of validations in the first place. Everything in life starts to become a constant mission and addiction to find something to better to add to the palace. More and more. It’ll be enough if I just have one more thing. 

That one more thing.

I wish I could name it.

But I can’t.

And I don’t think you can either.

Sometimes, I think that we need to remind ourselves that who we are is already a masterpiece, even if we can’t see that ourselves. We have to remember in the moments when we feel unworthy, when we feel small and not good enough for the world, that there is someone so awe-strikingly beautiful that we can’t even comprehend it, that thinks we are enough, that we are MORE than enough. That someone thinks the world of us, and sees himself within us. Imagine that! Imagine the beauty you must contain if someone like that could think so highly of you, could see you and just stop, and think, wow. This person is so beautiful. 

You are so beautiful.

You take my breath away.

Even though sometimes we can’t see it ourselves, we live in a palace, and the person that lives in the palace (you) deserves to be treated like a queen. So never treat yourself less than a fucking queen, do you hear me? Never choose to let yourself settle for anything less. Never let anyone tell you that you aren’t good enough. Even though I know that can be the hardest thing to do in the world. I am with you in this struggle. We are in this together. 

You are beautiful, and sometimes we don’t hear ourselves say that to ourselves enough.

Tell yourself that today, and remember it.

I love you, beautiful, you are never alone.

                                                                                                              - teeny, tiny & terrified