we want our film to be beautiful, not realistic! ...or at least we did.

i am the most regular female you could possibly meet.  i love puppies and kitties and buzzfeed.  i eat chocolate while i cry and play with my hair because i'm stressed out during exams (SIDENOTE: LAST UNIVERSITY EXAMS OF MY LIFE START THIS WEEK!!!!!).  i love love and adore my niece and nephew and cannot wait to have my own family one day.  and i fret about my body and my hair and my skin and size up every girl who steps onto the 6 Richmond bus each morning and wish i had her hair, her legs (usually legs - biggie for me), her nails, her nose, her eyes, dimples, hips, boobs, whatever.  whatever she's got i want.

now despite this, i've always thought i am a pretty confident lady - in fact, i'd go so far as to say i am over-confident most of the time.  c'mon now, i write a freakin' blog.  i obviously don't lack in confidence.  but yesterday when i saw that new dove ad, "Real Beauty Sketches", i was completely obliterated with obsession with the women's overt low confidence and misconception of their own beauty, their inability to seemingly be able to look at themselves objectively.

and so i had a big thought rampage all night long.  it mainly revolved around my legs.  i played sports for ageeeesssss and now they are big muscular things.  i hate them!  power legs are for the birds.  but i spent some time internalizing last night and i said to myself this morning - they're probably not that bad, ems!  (yeah seriously, all that inward, wound up thinking and that was as far as i got - I'M WORKING ON IT, ok?)

after all that heavy duty internalization, today was all sunshine and roses with my self esteem.  seeing all these people putting the Dove ad up on their facebooks, sharing the living fuck right out of it!  it was a beautiful thing!

then i saw the new Victoria's Secret campaign.

and then i lost hope for us again.

you know what?  i can see these bitches' RIBS.  i can see their ribs and their arms and legs are like twigs, borderline verge-of-breaking-off-in-a-light-summer-breeze twigs.  these girls are the image of "Very Sexy".  and of course they are completely beautiful, perfect hair, flawless skin.

how the fuck (excuse my profanity again) am i meant to compete with that?  you want me to buy that and put it on with the power legs?  um hell no.

i was proceeding into a fit of despair when i started to read the comments on the VS facebook page.  in summary the basic thought appears to be "can someone get these birds some burgers?"

and i felt a little better and i felt a little worse.

why is it that they are less beautiful?  why do i have to feel less beautiful?  why aren't we both, we all beautiful goddamnit?!

i guess it's like that general sentiment that the negative comments we get swim circles around the positive ones, that we remember our put-downs, but not our build-ups.  how do we turn that around?  how do i turn that around in myself?  i don't know.  maybe i need to just get off of Facebook, get off of social media, close my mind to the press, to movies, to talk shows, to the art that is fashion and modelling and opera and anything where this image is perversely shoved down our throats.  or maybe we just need to watch that Dove ad every day and recall that message every day and live and breathe and believe that message every day - you are more beautiful than you think.  it's not that those models are less beautiful than they think.  it has nothing to do with the models.  it's just you.  it's just me.  it's just us.

i think it's true, we are more beautiful than we think - it's just an uphill battle to remember it sometimes.