How can I stop fixating on my appearance? | Beauty
How can I stop fixing as much on my appearance? I am a woman in the end of the thirties and recently a photo taken in a professional context made me spiral on the way I appear to others. I find myself in photos for evidence that I am ugly or beautiful. In reality, I know that I am quite average and my appearance did not prevent me from finding a loving partner or living a significant life – so that should not have any importance. And yet, when my confidence bailiff or my mood is weak, it is my physical appearance that obsesses me. How can I go beyond the importance of looks?
Eleanor says:: Recently, I received a lot of announcements for cosmetic surgeries; I guess the Ghost algorithm thinks I would like it. But I continue to live this experience where I look at the photos “before and after” proudly presented and feels a poignant penchant for the woman on the left, now erased. Sometimes she reminds me of the women who have raised me. My teachers and loved ones and the mothers of my friends – good magnetic women and sparkling eyes who taught me to read and make cakes and laugh and aspire. Women “before” remind them, at various times of their average age in Old. But if the women I knew had lines on their faces or “flask” flows – it suspected of even talking about them like that – it is only by slightly seeing their echoes on these photos, labeled as defects, that I have never come to notice. I’m sure it’s the same for you with women who have played these roles in your life: we do not assess them for reasons of appearance. It would be a stupid misunderstanding of their value to do so. And of course, because of that, we think they are just beautiful. I miss these echoes in “after”.
The fact is not what you should or should not do with your face. Real women in these photos can be delighted. The fact is simply that there is a way to look at the people we love and respect that most of us use easily, daily. We see a whole person Instead of assessing or not exceeding parts of their appearance. Why is it difficult to extend this way of seeing us to ourselves? Why do we look at the women we love and admire through the macro of soul and character, but we consider through the ruthless microphone of a coarse mirror?
I cannot pretend to know – we are faced with industries worth billions and millennia to raise girls on skin care and diets. But I think the task you are faced with is how you see the same way you see the women you love. Literally visually see; So what comes to you from the mirror is a person, not a series of component parts that need to settle.
How do we do that? I think you are on something big when you say the appearance is looming when the confidence that boring or the mood is weak. I notice that the more I am more busy with things I love, the less she wonders to ask me what I look like. It is not that I answer this question positively – it simply does not seem important to ask it. Whatever that makes appearance unimportant is what life must feel full of.
When things feel bank, smaller interventions can stop the examination cycle. Delete the image. Put a smiling sticker eye level on the mirror. Something small that short-circuits the desire to set up on appearance. When the obsessive resettlement of looks is motivated by low confidence elsewhere, more visual evidence will not prevail. You do not look at yourself, do not reach a verdict and do not stop the investigation. You go back to the mirror tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as if things could have changed. It looks like hungry but it shouldn’t be nourished.
I bet there are people in your life who look at you as you look at the women you love. The task, I think, is to join them.
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