Your Own Kind Of Beautiful

Audrey Hepburn who is most famous for her role in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" thought herself too tall, lanky and not attractive by her own standards.  Betty Davis was considered to be too rough around the edges while Katherine Hepburn never considered herself to be the ideal Hollywood beauty.  Marilyn Monroe was a country girl who had a dream bigger than what most girls like her would pursue.  She has remained one of the most admired women in the world.  Every one of these women are icons of beauty and of talent.  Yet today there are still limited images of what we think beautiful and those images are still very limited as we can see month after month in magazines like Vogue, Elle and Vanity Fair.  Yet every once in a while a woman like Adel graces the cover of Vogue as she did just a few months ago.  We may not yet graduated to a place of reality when it comes to women and what is considered beautiful we are realizing that for many women beauty is about what is on the inside and even the ones who are not petite little figures there is the hope that beautiful will be redefined and include all body types and ethnicities.

Being your own kind of beautiful really means embracing who you are right now, in the body and skin you are in.  It is loving the image with which you were made and understanding that this image should be good enough in every way.  It  means that we must look at the person we are and be able to say "I love you just like this".  We can only believe we are beautiful as we are if we see our worth and our value and understand that it is not the outer shell that makes us valuable but mostly the inner person, the one we show to others every day.  When we live a life of purpose and we do our best to present ourselves in a responsible, loving and self-nurturing way we will see that our beauty is about every aspect of who we are, not just our body, not just the curvature of our brows.

Women are currently fighting the battle related to their body images.  They are still fighting for equal pay.  Women all over the world are doing their utmost best to shatter the size 4 image of beauty by coming forward and sharing their own image of what is beautiful, one that is much more realistic and encompassing of what women really look like.  For some women it has taken the form of rejection of beauty and a stance that relays a message that in fact they are not beautiful at all nor do they want to be seen this way.  But what matters in the end is that we all express our many views of what we think beautiful and voice our opposition of women being depicted as worthy or beautiful in the pages of fashion magazines and ads near bus terminals.  Each of us must insist that beauty has many shapes, forms, colors, personalities and faces.  We have to be honest about the fact that we have been fed so many myths about beauty and that the images are limiting.

I am a woman's advocate.  I think I have always been a woman's advocate because of the strong, wonderful, beautiful women who raised me: my grandmother, my great grandmother, my mother.  I also believe that goddess did me right by giving me two daughters: Taina Luz and Camille Marie, both of which are strong beautiful women.  Then as if this were not enough I have been gifted with three granddaughters: Mia, Isabella and Amelia.  When I look into Amelia's eyes who is only two weeks old what I see is the history of women like my great grandmother.  I see the future of a woman who is going to be a fighter and a warrior of women's rights.  I see a different kind of beauty in women who don't fit the Vogue myth of what women should look like to be worthy and beautiful.  I can only thank goddess for gifting my life with women like this who are a daily reminder that beauty is exactly what you think it is and that beauty invites every woman to be her own kind of beautiful.
Elliott Maximo Collazo