Viralizou: woman buys 1st bikini, posts photo and becomes successful on the internet
Attention: This text also has the opinion of the author.
"I've spent the last 18 years of my life waiting." So began the text by Lesley Miller, who, tired of waiting for the “right moment, ” decided to post her first bikini photo. For many women, even many, wearing a simple bikini is a rather complicated matter. Why? Because we grew up learning that bikinis are made for “perfect bodies” and “healed bodies”; because we grew up reading magazines that indoctrinated us to run after the "right body for summer."
Not fitting in with girls' magazines, movies and soap operas automatically robs us of going to the beach in a bikini, and then we grow up hiding our bodies in swimsuits - even though many are pretty - or, worse, in nightgowns and shorts. This, of course, when we do not choose to stop going to beaches, swimming pools, waterfalls and the like. If we don't have the “perfect body”, better not go, right?
Of course not! It has to go, yes!
Luckily, fortunately, we are getting freer and freer, and at this point, the internet has helped us to see that the world is made up of women of all sizes and that there is nothing wrong with that. Through blogs, tumblrs, Facebook pages, Instagram profiles, we women who have not perfect bodies, we find the representativeness we had never seen on the covers of women's magazines - and how nice to have to identify with!
As this happens, more and more women come to understand that each body is a body, with its measurements, its markings, its stories, and that beauty lies precisely in not being in a pattern that does not even exist - always worth remembering. that photos of the most beautiful models in the world are edited, so it's really hard to compete with that.
Miller is one of those brave women we met thanks to the internet. At 21, she decided to buy a bikini for the first time in her life. In her post, she says she spent her whole life telling herself that she would buy a bikini when she was thin enough, happy enough, confident enough, and when "my body was the way it was supposed to be."
No more billing
Overwhelmed since childhood, Miller says she was attending Weight Watchers' meetings at the age of seven, alongside much older women who, like her, were trying to lose a few pounds. After undergoing weight loss camps and countless weight loss attempts, Miller was the youngest person to undergo stomach surgery with the goal of losing weight at age 11.
At 15, she started making cuts in her own body, "I thought I deserved it." At age 20, she lost half her weight in a 9-month interval, and with this history of shame, weight gain and shame, Miller decided it was time to stop waiting to wear a bikini.
In the image, Miller shows the excess skin, stretch marks, cellulite marks, surgical scars, the bulge in his abdomen because of the stomach band. “I want to learn to love everything about myself, not just the parts that tell me they are 'acceptable'. Because the secret is that I've always been enough. And so are you, ”she finished.
Point for the girls
Since its publication, Miller's photo has received a lot of likes and has been shared countless times, and has been replicated on sites like the Huffington Post. We know that many people will criticize Miller's attitude and many others simply will not understand why she did it.
Still, we also know how important it is, for reasons of self-confidence, freedom, empowerment and breaking paradigms, to support courageous attitudes like Miller's, which help thousands and thousands of women who punish themselves daily for not fitting a pattern. of beauty hard to achieve.
It is thanks to this same pattern that increasingly brands of cosmetics and medicines, for example, are profiting. Selling products so that a woman comes close to perfection, and that perfection simply does not exist, is a smart move in commercial terms, but cruel when we think of the psychological damage that women around the world suffer from not fitting the profile sold as the best. more beautiful and socially acceptable. Attitudes like Miller's help us change that. Happy birthday to her.
