Confidence.

I have heard often that no one is always as confident as they seem. that the key to confidence it acting like you are confident. In my photo classes we are told we can access a lot of places with our camera if we simply look like we know what to do and seem like we are supposed to be there.

This concept of “faking” it has fascinated me for sometime. As someone who wears my heart on my sleeve it seems unnatural to pretend to be confident when I don’t feel confident but I started doing it a few years ago and the strangest thing happened. I became confident.

I was sitting in class this morning annoyed that I had to take a class on something I thought was so stupid in order to graduate. We were making portraits out of brown paper bags. Not exactly what I would consider fine art, but whatever. It’s not like I am paying thousands of dollars to go here. The room was quite as I made lists in my head about all the things I hate about waking up at 6 am.  but I began cracking jokes and asking everyone else about their portrait and before I knew it our whole table was talking about whether or not its gross to wear your socks more than one day in a row.
I thought back about my years in high school and how painful it was for me engage other people for fear that I was lame.
Sometimes pretending to be confident makes you confident.

I thought about this with my body as well. We all have an image of what is beautiful ingrained in our mind from the time we are given barbies and watch Cinderella. So when we look at our own body and its not poreless, hairless, blemish-less, cellulite-less and muffin-top-less we feel less than happy about those things.  But what if we just faked it?

What if like Fabienne from pulp fiction we thought pot bellies were adorable? And we rocked one with a t-shirt two sizes to small to show it off. What if our tan lines were like paper doll underwear, our freckles, moles and scars natures tattoos and our short nails cool because we could play the guitar. What if we let our bodies take the form they wanted with our health in mind and not our measurements? What if we worked out for strength, ate for nourishment and was ok with the form those components took. We could stop beating ourselves up over the things we dont like and start loving ourselves for the things we do like.

So I say we stop looking at our "flaws" and embrace the parts of ourselves that are unique to us, like Patti smith’s mustache and Frida Kahlo’s uni-brow, and we rock it, and maybe one day learn to love it.