How to Fall in Love with Yourself

Now before I start, I've never been the most confident person, and I'm not going to pretend now that I'm some kind of Beyonce, flipping my hair and looking fabulous all the time. But that's the thing. I'm sure Beyonce doesn't look 10/10 every second of the day, just like everybody else on the planet.

There's so much pressure put on us to look good all the time that we're actually making our bodies feel worse. I've had acne on my face since I was about 11, and the entire time growing up and moving through school, I was bullied for it, made to feel self conscious about it, and made to feel that I should be wearing foundation an inch thick just so you couldn't see it. But the thing I didn't see is that wearing that inch thick foundation and stressing myself out to high heavens about my face only made things worse.

Your skin is incredibly complex, and even after years of researching my skin to try and find some magic solution to my acne troubles I still don't know everything there is about it. There's so many aspects that can effect your skin that I don't want to just release a skincare routine saying you should wash your face more and moisturise. It's so much more incredibly complex than that. Your mood can effect your skin, if you're stressed out or self conscious, yes it is probably going to give you a breakout.

The most helpful tip I've ever learnt about keeping my spots at bay is to stop caring about them so damn much! Now I'm not saying if you ignore your skin it will magically get clear, but I found that my skin got much clearer (not clear, but better!) once I stopped worrying about how I looked, and started thinking about how I felt. I stopped giving a sh*t about wearing so much foundation, tuned it down a little and switched to a BB creme, even through I could still see all my spots, because I honestly just couldn't be bothered with going through tube after tube of foundation and feeling like my face was in a mask because of it. The same thing that I thought all those years was helping, was actually hindering my skin. When I decided to just accept I am who I am, well that's when I felt like I'd finally found a cure. And no- my skin isn't perfectly clear now, I still get plenty of spots, but I feel so much better now that I'm not hiding them.

I think there's too much suffocating pressure on us to look right no matter what. I used to be so self conscious that I would do a full face of makeup just to run to the corner shop, I'd never be seen dead in anything but a perfectly planned flawless outfit. But what I've realised is that it's okay to be whatever you feel like. If I want to get dressed to the nines at half 9 on a Thursday night because I want to feel good about myself even though I'm not actually going anywhere, then why not? If I want to go to uni in some joggers and my hair scraped back in a bun then I can, I'm still me. The important thing for me is that I feel comfortable in my own skin, because at the end of the day no one else is going to wear it for me. My body was made for me, destined to be for me. So why should I decline that and say it's not good enough? I am absolutely good enough, whether I'm wearing makeup or not, whether I shave my legs or not, whether I have a spot showing in that selfie or not.

I think the main takeaway from this post is that we need to stop bringing each other down, because at the end of the day it's only making it worse on all of us. If you are stood bitching about another girl's outfit as if it's the end of the world, then you are just feeding into the culture that makes us all feel more self conscious. It's funny really because we all try and pretend for social media that we are these perfect photoshopped humans, but really we're all the same imperfect but equally beautiful messes. We all bring ourselves down thinking we're inferior but the standards we're comparing ourselves to aren't even real most of the time, they're just someone else pretending because they're worried they're not good enough.

So lets end it now. You are good enough. You can wear, say, do, whatever you want to. Just be you. How can anybody tell you you're doing it wrong when there's only one you?