Give Yourself Permission to be Beautiful!

You’ll only be the beautiful person you were always meant to be when you refuse to be the person you are not – the person that others want you to be or decide to perceive you to be, so….

Don’t try to be like the skinny models in fashion magazines. They’re fake, a product of Photoshop, forty fags a day and a diet consisting of cotton wool balls and shredded paper.

Don’t give into the ‘group think’ of the age. God gave you a brain, use it. If someone is telling you again and again that something is right or is this way or that way then they’re probably wrong. Or lying.

Don’t unthinkingly believe what other people tell you, what you see on the TV, or social media, or read in the press. Remember, everyone has an agenda…research, sift the facts, check other sources, ask the question ‘who benefits?’ and then make your own mind up.

Don’t be indiscriminating in what you choose to entertain you. Ask for more than superheroes, hyper-violence and zombies; steer clear of the shallow, vapid mumblings of ‘celebrity’ culture and ‘reality’ television.

Don’t be afraid to speak. Say what you mean and mean what you say and say it from the heart and if others choose to mock you for that – more fool them for it was Plato that said: ‘strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods…and the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool.’

Don’t be blind to injustice and don’t be quiet about it, instead shout it from the rooftops. Even if no-one wants to listen, even if you’re not in a position to change anything you will at least save your Soul and, ‘six degrees of separation’ like, your words may reach the ears of someone, somewhere, who can do what you cannot.

Don’t take FakeBook and other social media seriously. It’s no more than a means of spying on what you say and think, manipulating and mining your data to sell you even more bling/crap/stuff that you don’t really need. Use it for what its function really should be: sharing cute pics of puppies and pussycats. Oh, and real friends are flesh and blood, not bits and bytes.

Don’t spend so much time on that bloody iDiotphone. Don't let its blue light blind you to the beauty of the real world. Put it down, look around you, talk (really talk) to people (real people). Experience life as thinking, feeling flesh, blood and bone, not by digital proxy.

Don’t consume as much. Really, don’t. You don’t need to upgrade this or upgrade that, you don’t need ‘labels’, you don’t need the latest style, you don’t need the latest piece of pointless technology. Your worth as a person is not defined by how much stuff you own.

Don’t trust politicians or anyone who seeks to authority over you – they’re all weird and dysfunctional individuals. But you know that all already, don’t you?

Don’t do what you’re told. At least not until you’ve had a bloody good think about it yourself and come to your own decision.

Don’t be mean, judgemental, callous, prejudiced, ignorant, uncaring or ungenerous but do guard yourself against the many people you’ll meet in life who aren’t worth your time, who have nothing to give you but who seek to take much from you.

Don’t let people belittle you or tell you that you’re not good enough – you are more than good enough and certainly better than those who attack you. Ignore them and their expectations of you, be secure in yourself and move on.

Don’t forget that justice and equality are not just for some – they are for everyone, for every single living human being on the face of this Earth from the moment they are born until the moment they die. Basic human rights and equality should be so commonplace and so accepted that they are not even a subject for discussion.

Don’t be normal. Normal people never achieved or made or changed anything whilst the ‘not normal’ people were philosophers, poets, discoverers, inventors, explorers, writers and visionaries. Normal is dull, dull, dull. It’s also an entirely abstract concept that doesn’t exist in reality.

Do be brave.
Do be real.
Do be different.
Give yourself permission to be you, give others permission to be themselves.

Give yourself permission to be beautiful!