The Beauty of Selfies

I love to poke fun. I’m a sarcastic person. I like to laugh. I’m learning to know when to be quiet and when to laugh. It’s a process.

Anyways, I like to joke. So I understand the fun that comes with laughing about selfies. They are everywhere. We put so much faith in them, how many likes they get, how many comments. We mess with the filters, we find the perfect captions. They get so much attention that they’re easy things to make fun of. I get that. I’ll laugh. I’ll make fun of myself. I will open my phone, stare at the thirty selfies I just took and crack up. I will go through them, find my favorites, send them to my trusted selfie critics and eagerly await their comments. I will then post them with a caption that fits and watch the likes. I, of course, care about how many I get but truly and honestly I don’t care too much. I don’t put my identity, confidence and value in the number of people who click the like button. My big thing is I NEED the likes to be divisible by five. So 18 likes is not okay. It needs to be 20. Not 21. Not 19. 20. Go figure.

I am that person. There’s no denying it. So I get the humor that comes with selfies.

But if I’m being honest, I LOVE selfies.

I love my own. I love my best friends’. When someone sends me a picture they took of their own smiling face, I, in turn, smile. I love liking every selfie on my newsfeed. I love seeing captions like “feeling myself”, “I feel pretty” or even a cliché quote they found on pinterest two minutes ago. I. Love. It.

Why?

Because I love self-love.

I once captioned a selfie as “Romanticize self-love 2k15” and if someone got that trending I would probably throw a party.

Our world is toxic. The media and the internet are viruses. They start to infect us as children. It builds. Every day, one more picture of a perfect women. One more article of how to be manly. A video on photoshop. Movies with “average, even bad-looking” female leads who are actually goddesses. Every day we open our computers, scroll our phones, watch our favorite TV shows and are slowly infected with this deadly virus.

Look up statistics. They are terrifying. Up to thirty million people suffer from some sort of eating disorder. Ninety-one percent of women surveyed on a college campus have attempted to control their weight through dieting. Eighty-six percent report an onset of eating disorder by the age of twenty. Anorexia is the third most common chronic illness among adolescents. These are just four statistics I know off the top of my head. There are so many more, not just having to do with eating disorders.

Self-love is not a common thing. And as soon as someone shows some confidence, they are written off as attention seeking and conceited.

It’s healthy to think you are beautiful. And if selfies help you reach a point of saying “screw societies beauty standards, I am freaking sexy” then I say take one every day. Soon this will start to spread.

Let’s raise each other up, not tear each other down.