You will have no doubt learned the term PERSPECTIVE in school, maybe in your art class, but not many know that before we can master perspective, we need to understand what PERCEPTION means.
We gather, receive, identify, store, organize, and interpret information from people and things when we perceive. A balanced sense of perception allows you and the person or thing offering the information to be on the same page.
If your boyfriend or girlfriend says you are good-looking, they feel and believe that; that is how they perceive and see you. From the moment you receive that information and the time it reaches your consciousness, if you are not careful, it can go rogue and come back to you as a completely different message, as if they had just said you are ugly. That happens not because you hear different things, but because you are sensing different things, or worse still, you are not sensing at all.
Mastering our perception, which means understanding through our senses, requires skill and time. Still, it’s worth investing in because, with a balanced way of sensing ourselves, we also change our perspective—our point of view, what we see, how we see it, or how we see ourselves.
For those like me who have sometimes struggled with body image (because of my short stature), the whole-body image narrative can be overwhelming. I didn’t grow up with constant images of who I should look like; back then, I wasn’t allowed to buy dolly magazines, yet I still had access to visuals that influenced how I thought I should look. We can’t always blame social media; some feelings are part of life with or without technology.
Technology has somewhat increased the narrative of not being good enough, though; It has become the typical tale that you recite while you do other things, not just while you are looking at yourself in the mirror. When we swipe our phones, that narrative becomes more insistent, and the faster we swipe, the more the narrative becomes convincing. Swiping is now the master switch that controls you, your thoughts, and how you sense and see yourself.
Those behind the technology are faster than you in feeding you information; you will always be defeated in this game of catching up with someone or something, and therefore we will always feel inadequate.
When you eventually lose control of the sense of who you are, you are left with just what you see, but what you see can be deceiving—all you see is not all there is.
When you look at a picture of a perfect model and see yourself as the total opposite, it can be tiring and energy-sucking as you try to convolute a way of reducing that gap on the beauty spectrum. Of course, it will be hard to accept ourselves after seeing such perfect images. So we indulge in the fantasy of how great it would feel to be beautiful and how happy we would be if we were thinner, taller, more intelligent, less chubby, less shy, less awkward, and less different. Suddenly we have joined the victims of the beauty holocaust, the feel sorry inner circle of hell we have all visited at some point.
As sad as it is, sometimes we must accept what we can’t change. If we get that hurdle out of the way, we don’t risk entering that limbo state where we confuse who we are by where we are placed on the beauty spectrum.
I ‘m known by Giovanna, the short and tiny one. You may be known as the chubby pale one, your friend is probably the one with the big nose, and your neighbour is the weird and different one. Whether we like it or not, people will refer to us by our most dominant characteristic or feature, one we probably had no choice in. We feel we didn’t get a good deal and shouldn’t accept it; according to us, it isn’t adequate, and therefore we resist it. Acceptance implies taking on what mother nature has given us and working to change what we can. If you don’t accept who you are, you are resisting, and resistance requires a lot of energy and fuel, a lot of thinking, and agonizing. The refusal to accept or comply with something will keep you in limbo, or worse still, in Dante’s inner circle of hell, a place or state of restraint or confinement where no grandeur can be achieved. Instead, if we accept or consent to receiving something offered—our face, body, and personality, we will start to perceive ourselves as adequate, valid and suitable; from there, great things will happen.
Stay tuned for some tips on acceptance therapy.
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