What if you didn’t care so much about your appearance? What if you could flip to the other side of the continuum about your looks and feel a decreased sense of their importance to you? What if you could expend less time thinking about your face, body, and hair because you hate how it eats up so much effort and energy and simply don’t want to live with such a spirit-killing pre-occupation.

Before you insist that this metamorphosis could never happen to you, take a deep breath and just consider “What if?” Ask yourself: What if I could care less about my appearance? What if I could change? You know how to do it: You used to adore certain friends and now don’t, were wild about particular songs and no longer listen to them, or were fiercely wedded to political or philosophical ideas and now wouldn’t be caught dead believing in them, never mind talking about them.

I’m not talking here about weight concerns. Plenty of folks without them who are and look culturally picture perfect are obsessed about their appearance. It’s an attitude/mindset/ viewpoint, not a truth/fact. You don’t have to be looks-conscious. It’s a choice: your choice. You learned how to be back when it wasn’t a choice because of how you were raised or due to your peer group or our appearance-hyper-focused culture. But that was then and this is now. Now it is a choice that you make every single time you unnecessarily fuss or worry about how you look.

Think about the freedom you’d feel if you didn’t want others to think you looked fabulous and just settled for them thinking you look fine or okay. Think about the freedom you’d feel not wondering if people viewed you as thin or pretty or attractive for your age. Think about the freedom you’d feel if you thought you could go out and do whatever you wanted to do however you looked. Think about the freedom of having a better life because you’re not fretting about being either judged or valued for your appearance.

Really, there’s a wide chasm between fabulous and fine. Many of us can get to fine or okay, but getting to fabulous is a whopper of an attention and energy waster. Truth is, we don’t need to look any certain way to live our best life—we only think we need to. We create much of this pressure in our minds through what we believe others will think of us and how we imagine that will negatively affect us. So, the same way you’d try on an item of clothing that isn’t what you normally think of as “you,” try on the idea of not caring so much about your looks and see how it feels. It’s a freedom like no other and by changing your belief system, it can become a permanently liberated state of mind. 

Best,

Karen

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