Eye of the Beholder

I was starving to matter once, worth my weight regardless of how heavy my heart was, turning a blind eye to the emptiness that only registered as stone cold in the mirror of my own eyes. And in that mirror of my own eyes, every single thing staring back was not even worth seeing. The scale of my mind only tripped the fault lines of definitions pounded into me my whole life of what beauty really was and it was never in the eye of the beholder, but all the other eyes watching. The ones that didn’t matter, the ones that looked but did not see. The ones looking through, touching but never holding and so I learned to hold myself at arms length away from the microscope of other peoples eyes. I learned to look inside my own heart, dig through all the baggage, unlearn the bullshit hardwired inside, and relearn the lessons worth knowing. It was the hardest lesson I have ever learned, but the most valuable gift I could have ever given to myself. When I weigh my worth now through the mirror of my own eyes, I count my heart first, and I always tip the scales in my favor to say: I am full, I am worthy and I am so fucking beautiful.

-Stephanie Bennett-Henry

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