I Dare to Love Myself out Loud!
A couple of months ago I posted an Instagram. I was out on a boat with my family who I had not spent time with for a year enjoying a beautiful sunny day out on the bay in the Florida keys. I was weeks away from marrying the love of my life, and was feeling a moment of when all the little pieces of my life, all the trials and fuck ups and bad choices and hard times had finally come together in a moment where I felt truly happy. It felt as if everything in my life was exactly deliciously as it should be, and there was not one thing I would change. WOW! What a thing to feel. Some people live their entire lives never having felt a moment like this, and here it was. I was so grateful for everyone in my life, everyone I had ever met or known that somehow played a part of me reaching this moment, and mostly, for the first time I could remember in a long time, I felt truly proud of myself for creating the life that I did.
The photo that I posted on Instagram, feeling proud and beautiful.
So here I was feeling all these things that honestly I felt I just wanted to scream to the world and so I did. I posted a photo of me in a bikini on the boat that day. Underneath the photo, I was claiming that I was happy, living an amazing life, proud of myself, and thought that I was super beautiful. I mentioned the word orgasms, claiming how lucky I was to marry the man who pleasures me in the most incredible ways, and I even went so far as to dare the world (or whoever looks at my Instagram posts) to envy me. BOLD CLAIMS. So bold in fact that I got text messages and comments from numerous people thinking that someone had hacked my account and was playing a joke. I got reactions of people who were happy for me, some comments of “haha you’re awesome”, and a whole lot of people who reacted negatively. I was called a narcissist, I was told that my post was inappropriate for social media, and some even called me crazy.
Some of the mixed reactions to my instagram post
My first reaction was to immediately care what people were saying. I thought about deleting the post, then I felt that I needed to justify myself and my words. “maybe I shouldn’t have said the thing about being envied”, I thought, or “why did I mention the orgasms”? To be honest, I gave more thought about what people were thinking about the post than I did in what I said in the post. This was because I said what I was really truly feeling, and then I got ridiculed for being happy and in love, and mentioning my sex life on Instagram. I decided not to the delete the post. And as I sat there looking at it, I felt the enormity of the paradox that people are living in. Be proud, but not too proud. Love yourself, but don’t show it too much. Have a beautiful amazing relationship and be in love fully, but just don’t talk about your sex life because it’s shameful or dirty to discuss.
Questions started coming into my mind, how come people post endless stories about their depression? Or post sad photos on Instagram about being a victim of something, depressed, dealing with bipolar, etc. And people praise them. Those people get comments of love in return, not hate. No one would dare to comment on someone’s sexual details of their rape in a “metoo” post, “that’s inappropriate for social media”. Yet when I mention my fiancé giving me amazing orgasms I’m ridiculed and criticized. I am so confused. Why can’t I be open about my happiness? Why am I shamed about expressing my happiness and commenting on something as beautiful as the sex I have with the man I love?
After this all hit me, I realized how much my happiness is a fragile thing if I rely on other people to define my self worth. Then I am only as good as someone else deems me to be. Well, I choose differently. I know who I am and I am proud. It has really been the past few months that this has engraved in me fully. I am me, Brielle, and fully beautiful and awesome regardless of other peoples options of me. Even just in writing this, I feel a sense of liberation and freedom like I had never felt before.
I no longer want to rely on other people to define my self worth
The truth is, I initially wanted to write a blog post about a huge accomplishment that I just made, but as I started writing, a strange thing happened. I realized I was writing it for other people. I was writing it in a way that was for other people to read it and be proud of what I had done, so I could feel good about myself. I stopped writing and when I re-read my words, I didn’t feel any of what I had written. This is clearly not what I want to say. So I stopped writing, and I asked myself, what do I really want to say? Not for anyone else but for me, and I began to write the blog you are reading now. What I really want to say is that I love myself. Truly. I believe in myself, fully! And I am an incredible woman.
I worked damn hard these past few years. Facing more obstacles and fears then one person may face in their lifetime. I opened myself up to my weaknesses and rebuilt myself into a woman I am proud of, I am more open and real and happy then I ever even knew was possible, and I sure as hell am not going to let caring what people think stop me from claiming this to the world. The question is now, for those of you reading this. Can you say you truly feel the same? If you feel you want to hate me or judge me for writing this, then you probably do not feel the same. Pride is the measure of conditionality of love. And man, am I proud of writing this!
Open, in love and proud
Written by Brielle Stephenson