Tattoos, Body, and Beauty.

This past weekend I got a beautiful white ink tattoo.  Anyone who knows me knows I love body modification-any form-and the more tasteful and elegant it looks, the more I'm into it.  While I've been preached to for the past four days that it's going to disappear, that it is going to yellow, and that it'll basically be invisible after the healing process, every time my eye catches the white calligraphy E adorned with a heart and a flower (I swear, it's so girly it'd shock most people) I feel a thrill like I couldn't believe.

All of my life, I've struggled with my body issues and self-esteem.  I have never felt beautiful.  Most days I struggle to feel presentable, no matter who tells me otherwise.  Body modifications give me power over my looks that diet and exercise do not.  Diet and exercise takes time.  Body modifications are immediate.  While they might require healing, they instantaneously take me from feeling like an ugly duckling into someone unique.   After all . . .my body, my decorations.

I have always heard the belief that to get a piercing or a tattoo is a way of defiling your body.  I don't see how that is possible.  Defiling it would be cutting your skin for perverse pleasure, ingesting drugs or alcohol for the purpose of harming yourself, and abusing your body with gluttony and sloth.  I was once involved in each of those examples and now that I'm not . . . I know that tattoos and piercings aren't the same thing.  They're a way of beautifying the body and soothing the soul that anyone without either wouldn't understand. 

There's a line about the body being a temple and to defile it is against God.  I can understand that this is a probable train of thought for most Christians.  After all, this life and the body we live it in are gifts from God.  However, feeling ugly and unworthy in that body is not what anyone should feel.  To wake up everyday, able to smile at what I see in the mirror because I can finally see beauty in it, is how God intended for me to love my body.  I just needed a little help getting to that point and anything that bolsters that confidence in anyone else isn't something that I could ever consider defilement.

My girly, elegant, beautiful white ink tattoo.  My 6th and counting.

Fairy Tales For Every Little Girl

When I was younger, I wanted nothing more than a fairytale romance.  I wanted some guy to come along, handsome and strong, and sweep me off my feet.  I wanted a love that shocked and awed me everyday . . .but then reality struck.  I was not the fairy tale princess type of girl.  I was a Goth, I was obese, and I was smart-intimidatingly smart.  I was Ursula from The Little Mermaid, the Evil Queen from Snow White, and I was blocking my own path to my Prince Charming.

And so, I settled.  I settled badly for the kind of man that Prince Charming would have dueled to death with-the vile, evil, doom-plotting kind.  I disappointed myself and tried to live with it, never imagining that it could be better, or that I deserved better.  I still saw myself as Ursula, no matter what I changed about myself.  I was unhappy with me and felt I deserved to be unhappily married. I did not deserve my fairy tale ending.

One day, after years of enduring his unappreciative attitude and evil ways, I woke up.  Not in that Sleeping Beauty kind of way, but like a coma patient finding their way to the surface kind of way.  I snapped out of it, so to speak, and kicked him to the curb.  Hey, if I was gonna be Ursula, I could at least do that on my own, right?

Wrong.  God had other plans for me.  In the middle of an ordinary life, He changed the path I thought I deserved into the one He'd laid out for me anyway.  He put someone in my life that, to this day, I still don't think I'm worthy of knowing and then took it one step further: He made this person my soul mate.  Everyday I wake up knowing I've been blessed just to have him beside of me and knowing that he feels the same way.  That was the key to it all, accepting that this is the person I was intended to fall in love with, that my Prince Charming was a tall, redheaded, sweet faced man with fascination with all things geek and that it was okay because I deserved to be loved.  Whether I wake up feeling like Ursula or Ariel, it doesn't matter, because he loves, honors, respects, and cherishes me anyway.

The thing I hate most about living where I live is that I hear too often that a preacher or a pastor will not do a wedding if one of the two people in the union has been married before.  They base this off of their own belief that God only intends for you to be married once and that is until death.  That no matter if you get a divorce or not, that you are still married in the eyes of God.  My husband and I were blessed with knowing a preacher who believed that everyone deserves second chances.

While the thought of still being married to my ex makes me want to puke, the concept of never being able to be with who makes you happy makes me sad.  It's a concept I would hate any girl to be brought up thinking because, people are imperfect and make bad decisions.  Young, female hearts are tender and susceptible to believing all types of things about themselves and ones they want to be in love with.  They should be taught that they deserve to be happy with the person they love, not that if they make a mistake or their hearts change that they should be stuck with a loveless, painful marriage. This shouldn't be what we teach children, that their happiness means less than an outdated religious concept.  The only thing we should teach is faith, loyalty, and the ability to recognize their own self worth.  With these abilities, there will be fewer second marriages to concern those who don't like them.  After all, every little girl dreams of having a fairy tale marriage . . . and she deserves the chance to have it, no matter if her Prince Charming is a little late showing up or not.

Thinspiration Vs. Reality

The two pictures above are . . .almost completely unrelated if you take out the fact that they are both beautiful women in bathing suits.  When I say beautiful, I mean in their own ways, though the pictures are both very striking. However, what I want to talk about is Thinspiration Vs. Reality.

Thinspiration is this trend going on online and in the real world where pictures of sickly thin women with "cut" abs have words that supposed to inspire someone to either work out or starve themselves.  The thing is, often more times than not, the women in the pictures are models or athletes who have bodies that aren't realistic . . .such as the woman in the first picture, which is by far not the worst I've ever seen.  Yes, she's a beautiful woman, but her body isn't easily attainable by most women without physically harming themselves or being born naturally pretty thin.  While it's good to want to be in shape, these ridiculous photos are harmful to women and young girl's mental and emotional health and should be banned and taken down.   I know that being a hefty young lady, these photos almost make me ill to look at and sometimes the quotes are just . . .judgmental and deprecating.

Reality is that as long as one is healthy and feels confident in their body that having a thigh gap, collarbones that make you look like a holocaust victim, and an 18 inch waist is unhealthy both physically and mentally.  I'm at a little over 200 lbs.  I'm not healthy.  I'm not hideous but I'm not gorgeous either.  The second picture is my ideal body frame for who I am.  That is my "thinspiration", not some unrealistic model with bones poking out obscenely and some crappy quote printed on it.  Those words do not inspire me and they do not deflect me from my goal. 

For any woman who feels like they need to lose a pound, or ten, or 100, I beg that you don't give into the peer pressure of "thinspiration" and that you lose the weight as I hope to do: gradually, healthily, and because you want to, not because society pressures you to do so.