Be yourself

In this day and age, the pressure is on to be liked, to be popular, to stand out from the crowd and unrealistically, to be perfect.

Some people go as far as to adopt a fake persona to try to fit in to different situations.

I think most of us have been in a situation where we have changed aspects of ourselves or exaggerated certain parts about us in order to feel included, but it shouldn’t be that way. It took a long time for me to realise that I am who I am; I do not need to change anything about myself for anyone other than me. If someone doesn’t like something about me, no problem, I’m not everyone’s cup of tea!

Once you are confident that you are being 100% your true and authentic self, life becomes easier, you don’t put effort into what others think of you, you can just be you. It’s actually very liberating!

Now, of course, being yourself is not just about your behaviour, it is also about embracing your looks. Surgical and non surgical procedures to defy ageing are very popular all over the world. Photo editing is even more popular, and a very quick and easy way to enhance the appearance of photos. I've never had any cosmetic surgery, fillers or Botox (as you can tell), I have played around with editing my pictures though. Whilst at the time of posting the edited photos, I'm happy with how they look, when I go back later, I realise that it's just not me.

I posted a photo of myself on Monday. But it’s not me! I changed some settings on my phone camera to “beautify’ me by smoothing out my skin to remove the majority of my wrinkles. This is the most I have ever 'enhanced' a photo, usually I just use one of the Instagram filters to adjust the colours and leave my face alone. Then I added a filter to enhance the colours. The result – an almost perfectly unflawed photo. But it isn’t me! In reality, I’m not 20 years old anymore and I don’t look flawless, I have wrinkles, blemishes and uneven skin tone thanks to my inability to apply make up very well. And I’m fine with that because that is me!

I don’t want to get into the habit of editing my photos. Don’t get me wrong, I am not putting people who edit their photos down, I just don’t want to do it personally because it takes away from who I really am.

So, here I am, in all my unedited glory, the confident, happy, perfectly imperfect, Danni!?