22 & not a clue

My boyfriend showed this video to me in bed the other night, and after it finished I was in tears and he smiled and said 'you don't see who you really are'. That got me thinking, no I'm not going to start Carrie Bradshaw style asking ridiculous rhetorical questions, but we as women are really quite hard on ourselves. The simple act of describing our face to a stranger does not marry up with how that stranger would necessarily describe us.

Yet we're becoming a society who take 'selfies' and send 'sexts', we are giving away our bodies soo freely these days thanks to the internet. It's this perpetual contradiction that we take photos of ourselves and yet can meet a stranger and struggle to say one positive thing about our physical selves.

I've struggled with my body image all my life. I am still struggling. I have never met a woman who is  100% happy with herself and I don't blame the media, I see it more that we don't promote a healthy outlook on our bodies within society from a young age. Mum better not be reading this, but daughters don't grow up being told to love themselves, instead mothers take the chocolate bars away and furrow their brows. Words like diet and weight creep into everyday language as that little girl creeps towards tenuous teenagedom. There's suddenly this sense of urgency that she'll become a hefty teen, life will be difficult for her, the other kids will pick on her because she's heavier.

Life will always be difficult, instilling a sense of foreboding about body image at the tender age of 11, 12, 13 and beyond isn't going to help. We need to teach our daughters to love themselves. Then teach them to make better choices, involve them in cooking, make them do at least one kind of sports or regular exercise from an early age. Basically, encourage being healthy to be happy over being thin to fit in.

It is my sincere hope that this generation of women, who have grown up with slut marches, fat shaming, thin privelege and rise of the plus size modelling world will go on to raise their daughters to love themselves first and appreciate being healthy second. Loving the skin you're in should be a given.

Tempus fugit has always been one of my dad's favourite Latin sayings. It mockingly hangs in the air betwixt beautiful consonants and two pairs of rhyming syllables.

After uni, time quite literally flies. Life begins to map itself out in terms of weekends. Something only your parents did, or so you thought. Trips and plans become your focus and before you know it it's March when yesterday it was January.

In six weeks I have moved out, held down a job, saved a substantial sum, had a no holes barred trip to Sydney & kept a nice lifestyle on the side. In just six weeks. It feels like I've been doing this forever. I'm happy. But I think it's time I shook things up a bit. 22 isn't the age to be comfortable. So I may bugger off to warmer climes, three days raining at 15 degrees will not do.

At this age, you want to be comfortable, but what you need is the swerving doubt constant in your life of will I make it? This isn't a challenge & I think, sadist that I am, that's what I need.

Spend more time doing what makes you happy and even more time doing things that have you on your fingernails. Because what else will you have to remember if you don't? That you had some savings & a job for a while. Was that it? When did you live?

Uncertainty is living. Do things that scare you.