Tag: insecurities

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Coffee Date

Coffee Date with Luna: Flowers in the Garden

Hello everyone and welcome to another Coffee Date with Luna! 

We have not had a little chat for a long time now. How are you all doing? 

There was one of my posts called Embrace your Insecurities where I discussed my insecurities and body image issues with all of you and today I want to discuss the thing that has an impact on our insecurities which is the Instagram girl. 

For all of you that are on Instagram or are familiar with it, you already saw in your mind a certain picture of a girl when you read the words Instagram girl. It’s the perfect, polished girl with big boobs, small waist, huge ass, tiny legs, Kylie Jenner lips and perfect hair. And girls like that exist in real life, but these that we see on social media, for the most part, only exist on social media and no one would recognize them in real life. I know there’s an equivalent for this girl in the male world and I suppose it’s the rich guy who drives a fancy car and has a 6pack. Correct me if I am wrong.  

I am not going to discuss in depth the impact this has on men’s and women’s body issues and eating disorders but I just want to talk about the fact that we are trying to destroy the most natural thing we have in the world and that’s diversity. Why is everyone trying to look the same? 

Have you ever come across a person that has made an impact on the world and read something along the lines of “s(he) looked, talked, walked and thought just like everyone else”? The answer to that is no because trying to be a clone of pop culture is suffocating your creativity and bringing desperation to your life. 

There is so much beauty in diversity but we are trying our best to pretend it’s not there or we have just become blind to it from years of following imposed beauty standards. Everyone can agree that nature is beautiful, but it’s beautiful because of its diversity, colors etc. If every flower was trying to look like the other flower, we would have one flower and our garden would look boring. Why are we trying to look boring?! 

I understand that people go under the knife or have cosmetic procedures done because they are insecure. I thought about stuff like that and stuff I would like to change but then I stop and ask myself – Is it worth it? Maybe in a few years, I will change my mind about this but for now, my 24 years old brain is getting really tired of this clone culture that social media created. 

When I filmed my first Youtube video I noticed that my face was very asymmetrical but I thought it was because I was filming on my phone. Then I filmed my second Youtube video with my new camera and realized that my face indeed is asymmetrical. I was trying to determine if it was the lightning, the angle or something that made my face look like that and then I realized that in reality one of my eyes is a bit bigger than the order, one side of my lips is plumper than the other and one part of my jaw was a bit “chubbier” than the other. And that’s fucking okay. Instead of believing what social media is telling me I need to look like, I will rather listen to science that has confirmed human bodies are asymmetrical and that’s perfectly fine and NATURAL. 

With the world we live in, it’s very hard to just love yourself and be there for yourself when the media is trying to tell you that you look/sound/talk the wrong way and that you are eating the wrong things and that your body is not the way it should be. Even if some find it superficial, having an honest talk about body insecurities and how social media exacerbated them is necessary. I don’t want to dive into these types of topics because I didn’t research them yet, but with the development of social media, there was a rise in suicide and more teens were entering different mental health institutions. Is this what we want?  

Embracing yourself and the way you are different, gives your body, face and soul the dignity and respect the world has been trying to take away from it. Let’s just find the beauty in diversity again and go back to nature from which we came and to which we belong. Remember: no flower is the same in the garden. 

Sending love and positive vibes,
Luna 

Last Coffee Date: Recognize your patterns
Youtube videos: Luna’s channel
Latest Poem: Poem #343

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Coffee Date

Coffee Date With Luna: Body Insecurities

Hello everyone and welcome to another Coffee Date with Luna! 

I am keeping the theme consistent with the last one and the theme is insecurities. In the last Coffee Date with Luna I decided to open up a bit about my skin and hair insecurities because insecurities are something many of us struggle with.  

One of the top insecurities people face with is linked to their body weight and body shape. We are terrorized by unrealistic beauty standards and it is in the human nature (unfortunately) to compare ourselves to those images, especially in the social media era.   

I am not a doctor, psychologist or any type of expert in the field so I will not be touching the subject of anorexia, mental health issues and obesity since I do not think other than experts should comment on this because people spread a lot of false information and negativity when they talk about things they are not educated on. 

I actually want to talk about my own insecurities about my body, weight, body shape. I struggled with it a lot. I was never overweight and, to be honest, I was underweight as a child because I had some eating issues which followed me up to puberty where I started gaining weight and my body got a certain shape. 

The thing that helped me through these insecurities was – love. It became my answer to everything and in this story it has two sides. 

With extra pounds, my insecurities started to pile on while I was in high school. I would often feel bad about not being thin, I would go on extreme diets and workout plans and developed a binge eating problem. I started to read a lot of books during high school, some of them were self help books, and without noticing the image I had about myself started to change when I got in touch with the concept of self-love. To be honest, I am still getting in touch with this concept every single day of my life. I am still struggling but I came to a point where I would never deprive my body of food or put myself on extreme workout plans I was too weak or unskilled to follow. Working out is great but going to an extreme can cause serious injuries, I should now.  

Self-love isn’t something you wake up with or can keep without making an effort. Self-love is about creating a relationship with yourself and we all know that relationships can be hard. You will have to work on it every single day. Self-love, bodywise, means choosing a healthy lifestyle instead of an extreme diet. It means loving yourself enough to feed your body with good food while not depriving it of some sweet cravings every now and then. You can work out to get abs while loving the chubby stomach you have now. This is a process and it doesn’t happen overnight.  

When you try to change your body while being fueled with hate or insecurities regarding your appearance, it will backfire on your mental health.  

As I got older, I actually became conscious of my body image issues when I started getting into my first serious relationships. My body insecurities messed with my mind and it affected my relationships because I was not comfortable with the idea of someone’s hands on me. That insecurity was not only toxic to me, but to the person I was with as well. During that time, I had accepted my body shape and implemented self-love into my life but I was just starting to realize that it wasn’t the reflection in the mirror I only had a problem with. My insecure mind created this image of how a person, in this case a boyfriend, will see me and my body and it scared me because that image was not very nice in my head.  

This is where the other side of love came to my rescue. A person I wrote many poems about, realized I would become very distant and would “wiggle” out of his hands very fast even when he wanted to only hug me. He actually realized my insecurities, and I will get really real with you now, when he noticed I would get anxious when my bra would be off. I was also insecure about being as flat as a board while everything else about me was chubby and round. I did not enjoy him putting his hand around me because I didn’t want him to feel I don’t have a flat stomach. He would sometimes lift me up while hugging me and I hated it because I thought I was too heavy for him to hold in the air. He felt those insecurities. 

He actually taught me that love will not see that what I see in the mirror. It took some time but he showed to me that love doesn’t judge and doesn’t walk around ready to measure me. Being with the wrong person, a person who judges you and tries to aggressively change you, will only feed into your insecurities. This is a good way of knowing is your relationship toxic or not. I think it is good, actually necessary, for the person who loves you to warn you about unhealthy habits etc., but actually criticizing someone and making them feel bad about themselves is toxic.  

To quote him: To my eyes you are perfect because I see more than your looks. I love every inch of you and that includes more than just skin and a body.  

At the end of the day, love is the answer to everything including our insecurities. You need to learn to love yourself and let others love you as well. Don’t tell yourself that no one will love you the way you are because there’s someone better. To the right person you are the best and you have to be the best for yourself.  

It’s all about love. 

Sending love and positive vibes,
Luna 

 

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Coffee Date

Coffee Date with Luna: Embrace your insecurities

Hello everyone and welcome to another Coffee Date with Luna! 

Today I would like to talk about insecurities, especially related to looks, because I have some and so do you. I honestly do not wish this episode of Coffee Date to be labeled as a girly episode because I think it’s discriminatory and feeds into the “macho man” narrative where men cannot have insecurities and talk openly about them because they have to “man up”. If you believe any of that stereotype nonsense, this is not the blog for you.  

Mostly, when someone brings up insecurities people first think about a few pounds they would like to lose. I had insecurities tied to my weight and body shape for a long time and it took a lot of work to get rid of them completely. I can say that today, with my 23 years, I feel very comfortable with my few extra pounds, not so defined curves and over all I just feel very comfortable in my body. If you’d like me to do a separate post about body insecurities and how I coped with them, do tell me in the comments. 

My biggest insecurities begin from the shoulders up – my face and my hair. When I say my face, I am not saying I think I am ugly. I am actually referring to my skin and my acne problem. It all started a few years back while I was at university. I have problems with my thyroid and the issues escalated one summer to the points where I started taking medication for it. My hormones were all over the place. This caused the outbreak of hormonal acne and I lost more that 20% of my hair.  

I used to have volume in my hair and it was slightly wavy because I actually had curly hair as a little girl. In one summer I lost all of that. My hair became lifeless, flat and it gets greasy in a matter of hours after washing. When I would dry it and run my hand through it, I would end up with a fistful of hair. I actually cried a few times while drying my hair because it was just hard to watch my hair fall out so aggressively. Doctors weren’t helping at all.  

And then the acne came. Doctors weren’t helping at all still. I understand it’s hard to fight such issues but I felt so awful and angry at my doctors. I gave up makeup for a solid year and a half. To this day I still refuse to wear makeup on a daily basis and put it on only for special purposes or nights out and that is hard. These acnes break out on my chin mostly, they are very red or white and my face gets very red and has that greasy shine. It is not comfortable to walk around like that especially not in a world that glorifies perfection and we live under the false social media standard of beauty. They are not around all the time, that’s the thing with hormonal acne – they break out during different parts of the month. It is a very disgusting feeling to wake up in the morning with a painful face. These acne actually hurt.  

Some of you follow me on Instagram @luna.theblog and are probably thinking that I am making this up. I am not, but on my IG pics I am mostly wearing makeup and you can’t really see my face. There are some pics, better said selfies, where if you zoom in you can see the imperfections under my foundation. My insecurities are very much visible in the fact that I never posted a makeup-less picture to my social media. That’s how much I do not like looking at my face skin. I do not photoshop my photos but I do wear makeup while taking them.  

I was told many times that I am so confident because I don’t put makeup on when going to work or grabbing a cup of coffee with friends etc. I am not confident but I do not speak loudly about it because I am scared of people then paying too much attention to my face skin. The rational part of my brain know that this wouldn’t happen. People are not standing around me judging my lifeless hair and hormonal acne and the rational part of me knows this but this is the thing about insecurities. They mess with the rational part of our brain.  

This is why you need to talk about them at least with yourself or on a blog like, well, me. Rationalize with yourself and do what’s best for you. I don’t wear makeup because it makes my skin worse and it took a lot of rationalizing to come to the point where I feel comfortable being makeup free on the daily. You have to learn how to put your own well-being ahead of people’s opinion and that voice that whispers in your ear. Giving up and giving in to your insecurities can harm your mental health and you could literally harm yourself because mostly our insecurities are about our body and the way we look. If you feed into your insecurities you will consider yourself not good enough, not lovable and people and companies who know how to manipulate your insecurities to their advantage will use them against you. I feel like I am building a conspiracy theory, but I believe you know what I am talking about. Expensive beauty procedures, strict diets, depression… The list goes on and it’s terrifyingly long (like this post) 

If you are insecure about your body or something else, it’s okay to try and change it but don’t forget to love it in the process. You can accept and love yourself while trying to change yourself.  

I could literally write on and on about this issue but I think it’s time to stop. If you would like to read more about this topic, just leave it in the comments below and also feel free to share your ideas for other Coffee Date posts. Don’t forget to let me know in the comments what do you think about this post, how do you handle your insecurities and how have you been lately. 

Sending love and positive vibes,
Luna