Sunday 15 April 2012

Apples and Oranges

I once read a statement that someone had made. She spoke about how beautiful she was as a dark skinned girl by putting down lighter skinned women. She showed that she could only understand her beauty and ultimately her own value, through a process of comparing herself with another group and by insulting this group of people.

After that I came to a realization. It wouldn’t be considered very enlightened or profound by most but it might be a tool for someone’s emancipation.

I have found my liberation in completely understanding that my value as well as yours, is tied up in our novelty, in the uniqueness of our lived humanity, in our very essence as people.

Having being compared to other people for my entire life it has always been a struggle to see the value that I possess in and of myself. Seeing as we are all the result of the sum total of our experiences, the only way then that any comparison can be a valid one is if we were all the same as people, having had the same variables in life. In math I was taught to only compare like with like, apples with apples, never apples with oranges.

So why then do we base our idea of our own worth on how we measure up to other people and their achievements? Our idea of self worth can’t be built on whether we are as smart or as pretty as the next person. We even go as far as to put down other people in order to feel a little better about our own situations in life, whether this is done overtly or in the private recesses of our thoughts.

When we realize that our value lies in the virtue of simply being who we are then we might come into a new dawn in our own lives. We need to realize that we are enough as we are and that we are equal to the challenge that is our individual lives.

All you need to become a success in your life is within you and your new dawn simply can’t wait for someone else’s approval because it will never come.

The task we all have at hand is to make the most out of the variables that we have been given in order to live the best life possible

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