My mission in life

After a good conversation with great friends tonight, I was reminded of something. My mission in life. Okay, who's to say we don't all have like 10 missions in life, but I know for sure that one of mine has to do with body image. I've always felt strongly about this- the devil tells people (especially women) that we are not beautiful enough, and it becomes consuming to way too many people. At first I thought it was society, and the way that media and images portray "beautiful" people, and to some extent, I still think that's true. But I also think it's straight from the devil- because I know of a few people in particular that no one in the world would ever think was not completely physically attractive, and yet those people think they are ugly, fat, and it causes them to not even want to eat food.

This makes me sick. The difference between me now and me back in college is that now I actually understand these people. I am one of these people. I struggle every day with what I look like. This happens no matter if I everybody around me tells me I'm beautiful or if I don't see anyone all day. This never used to happen to me, so I never used to understand it, but now I have been sucked in, just like so many other incredibly beautiful women, and my thoughts are constantly focused on appearance (exercise, eating, comparing, etc). It's incredibly disturbing.

Personally, this is something I am working on. Since I've never experienced this awfulness until a couple years ago, it has been a huge life change for me and has impacted me in bigger ways than I will take the time to share in this dumb post. However, I've been recently reminded how awful this is and am making steps to hopefully change myself in this way- through prayer (a HUGE piece of it), as well as making some healthier life choices regarding food and having some accountability to that. I'm not gonna lie- it is helpful when there are people in my life to tell me I am beautiful, no matter my size or shape.

However, outside of myself, I'm still unsure of how to fix this awful phenomenon that is taking over our world. But it is a personal mission of mine, and I am committed to fixing it, somehow. I've decided that I plan to live to about 95 years of age, so that means I have about 68 years to do something. And if that means even making one of my incredibly beautiful friends believe, if even for a minute, that they really are incredibly beautiful, then that will be worthwhile. But it would be nice to change the whole world. And what a stupid devil- he's gonna lose eventually anyway! Just stop trying.

That's it for now. Be on the look out for me to crusade around the world with my "You are beautiful" campaign. Just as soon as I figure out how to do that...