Back to acceptance. When I wrote about having compassion for ourselves and who we were it was important at that time to me. Yet with equal importance is acceptance. Something that I don’t always do. I think that accepting myself is different from having compassion. But not by much.

I was recently looking at pictures of myself and I was not very happy. It wasn’t my weight or the fact that I have these lovely white highlights in my hair. I really like the way my hair is changing. It was just looking at myself and not accepting that that was me.

It falls back to what we hear and what we believe when we are growing up. I grew up feeling like I was the ugly duckling and that maybe someday I would find where I belonged. But I never did. Because I wasn’t the ugly duckling. But I never accepted myself either. There were times when I would look in the mirror and see a reflection of someone I did not want to see. And I think that was part of it.

I never looked in the mirror and saw myself. I always saw a reflection of the trauma that I lived through. And therefore, I never wanted to accept myself.But now I want to learn to love who I am and that will require accepting who I am and what I look like. And no amount of plastic surgery, or makeovers is going to help with that. Because who I am is on the inside. It reflects out to me in the mirror. I would like to spend a day seeing myself through the eyes of someone else. But that is not possible.

I have decided to keep a mirror around more. Currently there is one mirror and I avoid it. To actually look at myself and see myself. Not just the picture of me I carry around in my mind but who I am, really. And maybe if I start to see myself I can learn to accept myself, have compassion with myself and learn to love myself.