Dear Laven,

I’m brand new to this forum but your post really stood out to me. I obviously don’t know you but I can’t see you as being a bad person for a few reasons: you’re here on Tiny Buddha and that means you want better for yourself and those around you, you want happiness. You’re also very hard on yourself which tells me that you’ve been hurt, and in my experience of being hurt by others, we usually don’t hit back because we don’t want others to hurt like we do.

If that’s true, then you’re just putting more and more weight on yourself. You even said it, that you look “defeated”. I look in the mirror constantly and see the bags under my eyes and the sunken cheeks and stooped mouth 🙁 but I can also tell you from experience, in the few times that I’ve had the strength to do so, your tired eyes will see beauty when they’re not clouded by so much self judgement and pain. When I started to get into a better, happier routine, without constantly being criticized, taking better care of myself.. sure I still had flaws but they didn’t look as pronounced. My skin was clearer, acne faded, my hair seemed fuller, and my smile looked better. Even my skin seemed tighter.

It was SO hard to do at first because I just felt like I was faking and struggling to take real care of myself, and I’ll admit that right now I’m having a hard time and seeing the ugly again in the mirror. It’s really incredible how my appearance can CHANGE so much based upon how depressed I am and how much **others** seem to value me. If someone else is beating on me mentally, then I seem to let that dictate how I visualize my appearance and even judge my value as a person. When I chose to ignore it (which was so difficult at first, I was literally chewing my lip because of the nerve and entitlement of some people, but I had to accept my own flaws in order to improve).

YOU deserve care and and YOU are a good person. Whatever pain you have should not dictate your beauty or your future. I promise you, when you start to care for yourself and smile more, you will begin to glow. It may seem like you’re telling yourself lies at first, but there really is something to that phrase “fake it till you make it”. You have value. You just have to tell yourself that till you believe it, because it is true, even if you don’t.

I’m trying to get back to that point of better self-care as well, but I’ve been to the good point and I know for a fact that those of us who have a lot of pain have eyes with a very convincing veil. A veil which can block or reveal our true self dependent upon the amount of pain we feel or how much care it allows us to give ourselves.