Being Tami

To understand what it’s like to be me now, you have to understand what I was like to be when I was a younger, less self-accepting person.

My early teens were quite difficult. Like other teenagers in this society, social media became a thing while I was growing up but I didn’t use or become associated with it until I was in secondary school. You could say that’s where It when downhill. Being exposed to social media made me lose my identity. To be honest with you, I only really used social media because my friends were using it and I used it as a way to gain validation from them. From around the age of 13, I wanted to gain validation from everyone; I wanted everyone to like me- but this would make me sad. I would look at myself at ask ‘Who am I? Really?’ I didn’t have a true sense of individuality and my personality was a mixture of everyone around me. I wasn’t being me. From here, you could say a lot of insecurities were born and I think the fact that I went to an all-girls school contributed heavily to these insecurities. I would compare myself to other girls and think about how I thought they looked nicer than me or in aspects, I thought they were better than me. Take skin for instance. Everybody experiences acne in some way shape or form at some point in their life. For some, acne isn’t that big of a deal for them but others, it’s everything. For me it was everything. I hated having spots on my face knowing there were other girls the same age as me with clear skin. My acne then resulted in scarring which, due to my skin tone, left (and still leaves) dark spots. I would get frustrated that this would happen to me and not to other people. This particular insecurity knocked my self-confidence down by a mile- I wasn’t comfortable with the way I looked and for a while, this was all I could think about. Another insecurity that also knocked my self-confidence down was the way my body looked. I would look at other girls and realise my body did not look like theirs, not one bit. When it came to things like own clothes day, I would be reluctant to wear a certain outfit- and if I did, I would feel insecure, like people were judging me. I would look on social media and see different girls looking like what I thought was ‘perfect’: clear skin, flat stomach, ‘hourglass’ figure. I would always say to myself ‘I wished I looked like her’.

This, in turn, affected the way I perceived myself. For a long time, I never saw myself as beautiful; I would always find something wrong with the way I looked. I could never take a compliment because I thought people were just being nice rather than meaning it. I could never be satisfied with a picture because I would find something that I didn’t like about it. I could tell you so many things about myself that I thought were ugly and nothing that I thought was beautiful.

As I grew older, I started to realise the importance of self-love and acceptance. We only have one body, we might as well give it all the love and appreciation that it deserves. Of course, this doesn’t happen straight away and for me, it didn’t. I’ve been told many times that self-love is a journey. My insecurities were built up over a long period of time and so I knew that it would probably take even longer for me to unlearn those insecurities and start to give myself a bit more appreciation.

In this life, it is important to remember who you are. We can often lose ourselves to the opinions of other people and forget who we are. This is a lesson that I learnt and always try to remember. Worrying so much about what others would think of me, took so much energy out of me, I realised it was much easier to express myself the way I want to and not care. I’m still on the journey to self-love. I’m still learning how to be the best version of myself and how to give myself love and appreciation.

Being me isn’t always easy; I still have moments of self-doubt and days where my insecurities get the better of me but knowing that it’s okay to have imperfections has helped me boost my self-confidence a lot more

So why tell you any of this?

I’ve always wanted to help people, whatever form that may be and whatever aspect of their lives that may be. By sharing some aspects of what it’s like to be me and show that it’s okay to have challenges and imperfections, I hope that I can encourage others to talk about themselves in a safe environment and let them know that everything about them is admirable.