"You Are Beautiful"

"Omg you are SO UGLY!"

There it was. 

My first negative blog comment. Forever ingrained in my brain.

My face got hot. I kept repeating the words over and over, saying it with different inflections, tones, and accents.

SO UGLY. so ugly. SO ugly. so UGLY.

I felt like my secret was out: I was an ugly beauty blogger.

Who would take beauty advice from an ugly beauty blogger?

I immediately deleted the comment. If Anonymous Commenter felt this way, surely everyone else did too.

Five minutes later, I deleted my picture from the post.

There would be no picture of me on my blog for another 8 months.

Let's talk about The Picture: a side profile, was taken with a phone in my bathroom. This was back when people actually read your posts with no ulterior motives, and no one had professional photographers take their pics. SEO was of no concern. Bloggers hadn't turned into "blog experts" yet, doing seminars across the country and such. We just blogged.

But back to the picture:

The lighting was awful. I had taken it first thing in the morning with no makeup, in my ratty pjs. No filters, just fuzzy 1.3 megapixels. I was trying to show a hairstyle. All the commenter saw was my face.

Exactly 8 months later, two amazing things happened.

I got another comment. This one was from a blogger asking why I didn't show my face. How can I demonstrate these beauty looks and hairstyles without showing what I looked like, she wondered.

Again, my face felt hot. She was right.

And then that night, I was in a grocery store parking lot, when I saw a note on my windshield that looked similar to this:

It was a sticker that said, "you are beautiful."

I turned around, looking for the culprit. Seeing no one, I stuffed the sticker into my pocket. 

Sometimes the tiniest things can make the biggest impact.

I taped you are beautiful to my mirror. It became the first thing I saw in the morning and the last as I brushed my teeth for the night. I would repeat it to myself over and over, in different accents and inflections.

YOU are beautiful. You ARE beautiful. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.

I didn't believe it at first. But I started to notice little things, like my posture changed. I walked looking ahead instead of down. I smiled more instead of overanalyzing my every move, thought, or what I spoke.

"You are beautiful" no longer became a meaning for the mirror. It became a meaning for the inside of me, as well.

The pictures came back to the blog--still with a phone at first, and then moving on to a "real" camera.

I started making Youtube videos.

And one day I just knew. I took the crumpled You Are Beautiful sticker off the mirror. I removed the backing and stuck it on a lamppost in the same Kroger parking lot where it was left for me.

It's still there, four years later.

It's there for others now.

I don't need it anymore.

When was a time you felt beautiful?