Looks like I'm doing that body image post sooner rather than later:
This is me:
And I am fat.
Excuse the not smiling in the second picture, as I took it all of ten minutes ago to make this post and was concentrating more on not falling off my stepladder (my bathroom mirror's in a weird place).
If you had come to me even a year ago and asked what I thought about my body, you would have got a never-ending complaints list. That my boobs could be bigger (yes, this was an actual worry of mine because I'm the only woman in my family whose boobs are smaller than her head), I could be skinnier, I could be less hairy, I could have a natural hair colour, I could be taller, I could have smaller feet, I could have a better hips to waist ratio...
Basically, I had the same worries that the majority of women are trained to have. And then something clicked. It wasn't people flirting with me - I'd been flirted with before but never really believed it, brushing it off and blushing and getting almost angry in denial at points; moreover, I hadn't been flirted with in an age anyway.
It was someone saying, quite simply, that when you judge yourself by what others have said, you're giving them ownership of your body.
It was a bit of a slap to the face to read it written so bluntly, but to me it made sense. We're happy to look at others using our personal standards of beauty rather than those dictated by society, 'secretly' loving wrinkles, pinches of belly, dimples, imperfections in skin, scars and bad hair days and all the little things that make other people human.
But when we turn that eye to ourselves, we let imperfections blow up into something hideous; we let ourselves believe despite everyday evidence to the contrary that no one will ever love someone who wears glasses/has no boobs/is overweight/wears their hair short before 50/wears their hair long after 50.
In so many cases we've let bodies be replaced by art, believe they should be sculpted and shaved and carved and burned into perfection, and still criticise them for not looking like they've walked out of three hours of make-up and four hours of hard work in photoshop.
We're not made to be statues. We're not made to be paintings. We can be captured in them, yes, but a photo is a split second memory of a split second moment and it's not a person. People are beautiful in so many different ways, not just on the inside - don't fall into the trap of thinking "I'm ugly but that's okay because I have a personality", because you are not ugly, your personality is a bonus on top of your being a living, breathing, beautiful human being.
It's about time we stopped judging ourselves as if we were cold things to be hung up in galleries or tucked away safely in the attic. We're beautiful because we're alive, something a photoshopped magazine shoot will never be.
I am a fat girl. I'm a fat girl because I enjoy good food and I spend more time indulging my desires to read and write and sing and cook than I do exercising to shift weight I don't particularly want to shift anymore. I sometimes let my eyebrows grow in completely. I sometimes leave my hair undyed for months on end. I epilate my chin because otherwise a beard likes to show up, and I have to scrub that skin clean for days after to stop it completely exploding in a rash. I am imperfect.
And I feel prettier and more confident than I did when I was three dress sizes smaller.
TL;DR version - everyone deserves the right to see beauty the way they choose to see it, but that isn't an excuse to use a particular beauty ideal to hurt others.