6

My parents told me I'm pretty

 3 years ago
source link: http://ana-balica.github.io/2018/07/21/my-parents-told-me-im-pretty/
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.
My parents told me I'm pretty
Ana Balica

Hi, I'm Ana.

I'm a software developer. I mostly do Python. This blog is about my adventures with code, travel experiences and relevant life events. I try not to take myself too seriously.

Here's what I'm doing now.

Occasionally I give talks.

Please don't take my words for granted, because Internet is full of bad advice, and I might be part of it inadvertently.

21 July 2018

My parents told me I'm pretty

As I child, I hated my skin colour, my name, my boring hair colour, my height, my asymmetrical eyes and lack of lashes on a patch of my left eye. When I say “hate”, this was the literal word I’d use. Probably I’ve been bitter about lots of other things, but I can’t remember them all now. Largely because I believe my parents eradicated most of these insecurities by constantly reminding me that I’m pretty.

The power lies not in just repeating this like a mantra. It didn’t feel like it was just parent’s blind love - “No matter what others think, we love you anyway”. Nah, wasn’t like that.

Say, I was bummed out about my darker skin. I know I look white to most, but in my community I was slightly darker than others. My mom would always emphasise how beautiful my olive skin looks and how rare it is. She’d include this in every homework description I had to write about myself. She’d point out how other famous people have similar skin tone - this made me pay attention. Now I’m perfectly fine in my own skin (pun intended).

It went on and on, picking one thing at a time and making me proud of just how it is. Interestingly I think this didn’t make me narcissistic or obsessed with beauty over values and brains.

I have no idea if they did this deliberately, but they managed to make me accept who I am.

So, I guess, tell your close ones they are pretty 💛

newer → ← older Powered by Jekyll - Theme merge between hikari and Notepad

report

Recommend

About Joyk


Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK