Self-esteem

Have you ever had so many random thoughts running through your mind that you didn't know what to do with them? You keep telling yourself that you are going to write down those thoughts but you never did? That's whats happening to me. I can go on and on about different thoughts that keeps swimming in my mind, but I'm only going to share one thought and one topic at a time. Self-esteem is a problem that everyone can talk about, especially myself.

When you open up a fashion magazine and see a beautiful face with flawless skin and shiny beautiful hair, you automatically think that that person in the magazine has it going on. So many people aren't satisfield with the way they look, whether it's their hair, arms, legs, feet, nose or facial expressions. So many people want to be like that person walking on the street or somebody in their office. I remember when I was in highschool, I was this short, small and goofy looking girl who wished she was thick and have long flowing hair. Back then I had braces and wore glasses (I still do now). I never liked the way I looked because I wanted to weigh a certain weight and I wanted to have a big booty and toner arm muscles.

After graduating from high school and going to college, I started to feel a little bit better about who I was but I was still this short, petite girl with glasses without the braces and I wanted to weigh at least 120 pounds. When I see other girls walking on campus who are bigger than I am, I used to get discouraged. I know I'm this beautiful strong African American female whose dark skinned and thought that light skinned girls or "redbones" were much better attractive than people who were brown-skinned "milk chocolate" and dark-skinned. Man I had soo many thoughts running through my mind because I wanted to be of a different color and have a different body texture for what reason? I'll tell you the reason. Guys who constantly degrade women and being very particular about what type of female that see themselves with and the physical appearance they wanted in a girl drove me INSANE!

I mean physical appearance isn't everything when choosing your mate! Well quite naturally, you don't want that person to be ugly, but at the same time, it's about what's in your heart and not the outer appearance. But a lot of people don't see that and don't realize that. Soo many females trying to loose weight because they think if they are skinny, people will accept them more so they starve themselves to death and drink these slim fast drinks. Learn to accept who you are inside. Don't worry about what people think of you. I'm not saying there isn't peer pressure, but we have to learn to cope with those feelings, these suicidal thoughts because we don't like our bodies.

God created us in His own image, so we have to learn how to accept our bodies and move on with our lives. If people don't like our bodies, so what! You have to live and learn! It's a living and learning process for all of us and we can't give up hope!

Just continue to pray for low self-esteem and God will continue to work it out!

Patrice N. Rivers