Yesterday, I told you that you are already enough. You are beautiful, already, right now.

The thing is, I don’t actually believe that telling people they’re beautiful really helps them. In fact, I believe it’s kind of useless. I wrote about this once, two years ago, in a post that has long since expired, in response to a Facebook event I saw called “Tell Her She’s Beautiful.” Let me reiterate it now:

Telling someone they’re beautiful when they don’t believe it doesn’t really do anything for them.

In fact, it borders on useless.

In fact, it could very well make them feel worse.

I do tell people that they’re beautiful. But I usually end it with a disclaimer: but that doesn’t mean anything unless you believe it yourself.

The thing is, if you don’t believe you are something, then you already aren’t that something– because what you perceive to be reality reflects your beliefs, and the thoughts you choose set a limitation on yourself that you cannot be [insert ephemerally-defining word here].

I am beautiful, not because people tell me I am, but because I know it. I believe in my own beauty, and I recognize it. I see it every day in just the mere fact that I am alive and I have the ridiculous blessing of a functional body.

I see it in you, too. You reveal it to me effortlessly, just by being here.

But that doesn’t mean anything.

A thousand handwritten letters in special envelopes writing that you’re beautiful won’t make you believe it. Five hundred strangers affirming your worth is not what you need to realize that you are worth the world. Your favorite musicians proclaiming that you are already good enough with a song specially created for you might not even budge your mind.

Your best friend could tell you, over and over again, for a hundred years that you aren’t worthless, that you aren’t ugly or not good enough, but that might not even change a thing.

Nobody else can do the work of letting go of the lies you tell yourself.

Only you can.

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