Decisions

As a kid, I always wanted to be an adult. I mean who didn't? I'd see my parents making important decisions and then depending on how things went, they'd either make the best of what was handed to them or try to make a difference. I wanted to do that. I couldn't wait to be an adult. I thought it would be simple... That transition from being a child to an adult. I always imagined that I would wake up one day and know that I'd become an adult. I'd intrinsically know how to make life decisions. My parents and all the other adults I knew made it look so easy.

Being at a precipice makes you realize that maybe it wasn't so easy. There are decisions to be made about everything. They range from something as irrelevant as what I'm going to eat today or wear today, to something as ridiculously large like what am I doing with my life? I see friends from all walks of life. I see them going to parties, getting drunk, getting married, having babies. And I see friends who lose someone they love. They decide how they're going to live their lives. They take lemons and make their own version of the lemonade.

Some decisions are harder to make than others. How do you know that decisions that you make aren't going to come back tomorrow and bite you in the ass? What do you trust to make decisions? The heart or the brain? Some people will tell you to trust the gut. But what makes a decision a good decision? There are always consequences to any decision you make. Everyone always tells you about the consequences. Don't do activity A or you will go through X.  Nobody teaches you how to make a decision. Maybe they should.

Being an adult hasn't been easy so far, but what do I know, I'm still a kid trying to be an adult. At the end of the day, aren't we all? 

Beauty

A friend of mine once told me that I would look nicer if I "lost a little bit of weight and (was) a little fairer". That night I came home and cried for a few hours. There are days when I look at myself in the mirror and I wonder, did I get a new zit, did I gain an extra bit of fat right here. I look under my eyes and I see the eye-bags, the dark circles. I see the little flaws that nobody would care about. Yet I do it. I wear makeup to make myself feel prettier, because my entire life I've been told that fairer skin was prettier. Having my eyes look a certain way would make me more attractive. Wearing a certain shade of lipstick made me look like a "slut". People have issues when I wear make up and when I don't wear make up. There is no pleasing everybody. There's no way that I can just walk out of the house and not be judged for how I look.

I don't always put an effort into what I wear, but when I do, I do it for myself, not because I want you to think I look attractive in photos or in real life. I do it because I feel like when I dress up, I meet the beauty standards society has taught me. I do it because I want to feel pretty. And even though it's for myself, I  find myself conforming to society's expectations of me. I haven't yet learnt to accept my body for what it looks like. I always find myself looking at the fatter parts of my body and feeling conscious about it.

I don't want to nitpick on every single part of me. I want to learn to accept my body for what it is. I don't want to live in a world where I am judged every single day for not meeting your standards of beauty. I want to start living in a world, where the only standard of beauty I am held up to, is my own!