Dear Laven:

I know the glancing up at the mirror moments, I know the experience.

I wanted to tell you (I thought about it earlier today, before your most recent post): I’ve been posing in your threads since March of this year, over five months of posting. And never did you address me, never did you mention my name, or say thank-you, (neither to me, nor to your other responders).

And I told you recently: it’s okay, you don’t need to respond to me, no need to address me, just keep expressing yourself, for as long as you need to do that.. for as long as it helps. And I still say: please do: start more threads, type away your thoughts and feelings for as long as you need to.

And.. I have my needs: I need to be acknowledged for my efforts to attend to you, to make you feel seen and heard. I need to honor- not only your needs- but my own needs.

And so, as I said before, you are welcome to start as many threads as you wish, you are welcome to submit posts of any length. It’s just that if you do not address me by name (anita), and you do not talk to me, I will not post in your threads again.

Other responders may reply to you, and that is fine with me. Please keep posting. It’s just that I need to read my name, typed out by you, for the first time in five months, for me to reply to you again.

Assuming you will not address me by name (because it hurts, because you can’t, as you expressed), I say: goodbye, Laven, my best wishes for you. Post again and again, others will respond, I think.

anita

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.