Beauty starts from within.
If you don’t believe you’re beautiful, and you continuously bring yourself down, how do you expect others to fall in love with you? Like I said in my last piece, when it comes to cerebral palsy and dating, beauty starts with you. Before you allow others to see how beautiful you are, you have to acknowledge that within yourself.
At one point in my life, I wasn’t thrilled with the body that I was given. In fact, as a teenager, although I had a constant smile on my face and acted like I was such a positive influence, I always had it in my mind that I was never going be beautiful enough for anybody since I had cerebral palsy and I use a wheelchair to get around. In the sixth grade, I had to start wearing braces on my teeth since I had buck teeth. In middle school and high school when there was a dance, my ex-boyfriend wouldn’t ask me to go with him and would make excuses of why he could not attend the dances with me.
I often felt if I didn’t have cerebral palsy he would have found me more beautiful and he would not have been ashamed of escorting me to a dance. It didn’t help that sometimes he would tell me that his family preferred if he dated someone that wasn’t in a wheelchair, and sometimes he would say that he preferred that as well.
I hated to admit it, but I was ashamed of the person I was because of my cerebral palsy.
If I could go back and tell my old self-anything, first, I would have myself looking in the mirror and tell her everything makes her beautiful, regardless of what people think of her. They don’t know you; You’re beautiful in your own way. You shouldn’t want to hide since you are the coolest, funniest, most creative girl the world has to know.
Don’t ever be afraid to be YOU! In the words of Jalaluddin, Mevlana Rumi: beauty surrounds us.