I Learned To LOVE The Way I Look. Here's How YOU Can Too! ｜｜ Sharing my INSECURITIES...
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
198.98055
Summary
Insecurities about the way you look can make you feel less than and more insecure about who you are. And when you compare yourself to everyone else, you start to feel less and less confident about yourself. So today, I wanted to share how I learned to love my looks and how you can too.
Transcript
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Hello, Classic Crew, and welcome to today's video where we're going to be talking about
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how I learned to love the way I look and how you can, too.
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I think all of us have insecurities about the way that we look.
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We compare ourselves to things we see in movies.
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We compare ourselves to stuff we see on social media.
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And when you compare yourself to everyone else, you really start to feel less than and more
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Especially given the fact that so much of what we see is filtered or has Photoshop on it
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and makes people look unrealistically perfect, and we're comparing ourselves to things that
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And when you're comparing yourself to something that doesn't even exist, it can be really hard
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So today, I wanted to share how I learned to love my looks and how you can, too.
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Here on my channel, we talk about commentary, lifestyle, beauty, fashion, and opera, all
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So if that's something that you'd be interested in, please feel free to subscribe to my channel.
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So I'm excited to share this video with you guys today.
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The first thing I want to say before we start off is that just because I'm making this video
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doesn't mean that I'm confident 100% of the time.
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I don't think anyone is confident 100% of the time.
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But what I'm really talking about in this video is how I've learned to kind of respond
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to my own negative thoughts and talk myself out of them.
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Because I think we all have negative thoughts, and what it really comes down to is being able
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And that doesn't need to come into the way that I think about myself.
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I think it's something that we can all improve on is kind of our negative self-talk and how
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to make ourselves feel better about the way that we appear and the way that we look.
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I also want to quickly mention that I'm not talking about the body positivity movement's
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encouragement of unhealthy behaviors, such as being overweight or underweight.
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Beauty is an extension of living a healthy and joyous life.
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And being healthy and being fit and treating your body with respect, those are things that
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And once you've kind of accomplished that, where you are in a healthy space with your body,
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And I have been insecure about a lot of different things about my appearance throughout my life,
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just like I'm sure many of you have struggled with things like that.
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So I wanted to start off with my height, because I am very tall.
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I am 5'8", which is tall for the average woman, but it's very tall for Jewish women.
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At synagogue, we have something called a mechitza.
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And it's kind of like a barrier between the men's and women's sections, because we're supposed
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to be focusing on our prayer, and we're supposed to be focusing on our relationship to God.
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And you don't want to have the distraction of kind of flirting with or thinking about
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The mechitza can really range in height, but it's generally at least 5 feet.
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And it's supposed to block your view from one side to the other, depending on the synagogue
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Some synagogues have a lower one, but it really just depends.
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I would wear heels to synagogue, and I would tower over the mechitza.
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And no one else was towering over it, none of the other women, because they were shorter
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But I would always be much taller than the mechitza if I wore my heels.
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Even if I was wearing flats, I was taller than the mechitza was.
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So I was able to see everyone on the other side.
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I was able to see all the men, and they could see me.
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And I was really self-conscious about it, because I was tall.
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I was just taller than everyone else around me.
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And it's not only that I was taller than the women.
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And so I was taller than a lot of the men, too, which was really making me self-conscious,
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because not only was I just taller than my girlfriends, okay, whatever, but I was taller
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than the men that I might even be interested in.
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The next thing I was insecure about was my body type.
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When I was young, the movies that I watched with my family were more from the 40s and 50s,
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and the body type in those movies, the ideal body type, was much more similar to mine.
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It was like hourglass and curvy, and I saw myself reflected in those body types.
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But as I got older, I watched TV, and I watched more modern movies, and the women that I was
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seeing on the TV were totally different than what I looked like.
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They were really thin and not curvy at all, and I thought that was absolutely beautiful.
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When I was younger, the style of the time was being very, very thin and not having curves.
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And the clothing that was made was made for women who didn't have curves.
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The Kim Kardashian look, which is now kind of the body type that everyone wants, that's rather new.
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When I was growing up, that wasn't the body type that was considered the ideal body type.
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And so I got really insecure comparing myself to the women around me who were shorter and more petite.
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I thought that that was the most beautiful body type.
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I started to feel just a lot bigger than the people around me.
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Now, the third thing I was insecure about was my nose, and that started in middle school.
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A boy I had been friends with in middle school told me he had a crush on me.
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I kind of liked him back, but we didn't end up dating.
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And when we were in class one day, he told me I had a big nose.
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I knew he was trying to hurt my feelings, but at the time, I had literally never even thought about my nose.
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But I wasn't able to not think about it after he said that.
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I wasn't able to not look at my nose and see how big it was.
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I looked at my friends who have a more typical and accepted nose in kind of Western society,
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And I was really jealous of the little button nose and the noses that weren't distinct like mine.
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All of this comparing myself to something I could never be made me really unhappy.
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But then I realized, I'm never going to look like a petite framed 5'1 girl.
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So comparing myself to people who I could never look like,
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comparing my fitness journey to women who looked entirely different than I did,
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and I would never look like no matter how hard I tried, made me feel awful.
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Constantly comparing myself to people who were structurally built differently than I am
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So what I realized was that I needed to, one, find inspiration from women who I thought were
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beautiful and who shared my features, and two, only compare my fitness journey and my
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body progress to myself and not to somebody else who I would never look like.
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So the first part of this was discovering Maria Collis.
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She's an incredible inspiration of mine musically as well as physically.
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She was a beautiful singer, but what was really impressive about her was that she always put
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She wasn't an opera singer who made singing the most important thing.
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She was always focused on the character as well as her voice.
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It's something that I really respect, and it's something I try to do myself in performance.
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But she also had a very distinct nose, and I thought she was beautiful.
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And that made me feel so much more confident in my own features, because I thought to myself,
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if she can be beautiful with a big nose, so can I.
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I could look at her and know that I also was beautiful, even if I didn't have that standard
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nose that so many of my friends in high school opted to get plastic surgery to fix.
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And then I started to look up celebrities who had similar figures to mine.
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I tried to find inspiration from their fashion to incorporate into my style so that I could
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see what was flattering on them and then see what was flattering on me.
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And it did end up bringing me back to those classic Hollywood stars from the 40s and 50s
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And they knew how to dress them, so I started dressing in a way that flattered my figure
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and was more similar to the way that they dressed, belting my outfits, not trying to wear a very
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That would just make me look heavy as opposed to make me look beautiful.
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And when I exercised, I started to look for inspiration from women who had a similar body
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And so I could start working out in ways that actually were beneficial for my body type.
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Having blue eyes, green eyes, or brown eyes is all beautiful.
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Having a larger nose or a smaller nose, that's beautiful too.
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As long as you're healthy, eating right, exercising, and taking care of yourself,
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Accepting what your body and face can look like, as opposed to what you want it to look like,
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is the first step toward embracing who you are and loving yourself.
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The best version of your specific genetic makeup that is unique to you and you alone.
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You're never going to be taller or shorter or thinner or curvier than you are.
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So accepting the things that make you you will make you so much more confident.
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Finding women that you think are beautiful, who share your features and your body type,
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will remind you that there are so many different ways to be beautiful.
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There's not one specific model that we all have to fit into.
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Again, as long as you're healthy and taking care of yourself,
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you should love your body and the way that God made it.
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This is why I think there's a very important differentiation between body standards
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as far as saying that people should be healthy and fit,
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and that's a good standard that we should fit into,
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and body standards that say that everyone needs to look the same.
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Everyone doesn't look the same, and that's good.
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That's okay, and that's what makes us all so diverse and beautiful in our own way.
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Please let me know in the comments what you think.
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I'd love to hear, and share with me something that you're insecure about.
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and hit that notification bell to get notified of all my new videos.
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which will just be a little dose of classic into your inbox twice a month,
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Thank you so much for watching today's video, and I'll see you guys in the next one.