This Is My Beautiful Website Launch

Photo of Sheila Hageman by Keyvan Behpour

Introducing my new website project--This Is My Beautiful.

This Is My Beautiful is a safe space to share and celebrate our diverse beauty as women, a place to proudly say to the world—This Is My Beautiful!

We live in a world where what is considered to be female beauty is often predetermined and shaped for our consumption. Let’s change that by celebrating beauty in all its shapes, sizes, colors and subtle nuances.

Break the cycle of body shame and self-hatred!

Our life stories and dreams can be found in both our inner and outer beauty. There is nothing wrong with celebrating our physical beauty—our outer uniqueness! And we all are beautiful.

We need practice as women saying This Is My Beautiful and I’m proud. Too often we believe it’s egotistical to recognize and discuss what makes us beautiful on the outside. Sayings like “Beauty is only skin deep” lead us to think that being aware of our outer beauty is shallow and rude. But if we look around ourselves we are able to see and celebrate beauty in others and the world.

A beautiful sunset can remind us of a deeper beauty that lies beneath the outer container. Physical beauty can represent the beauty, the love, the passion that lies inside our hearts and souls.

Capture your beautiful, your sexy, your confidence. Nourish your soul by proclaiming to the world that you are allowed to own your beauty. Let’s affirm for each other our Beautifuls that may never have been noticed or affirmed before.

Share a photo of yourself where you exhibit your beautiful and tell us why the photograph creates that feeling for you. It can be a close-up of one of your toes or a long shot of you standing holding your child—whatever photograph you look at and feel proud, happy and in love with yourself in some way.

Please visit This Is My Beautiful and share your photo and story today!

Erotic Ballerina Addicted to Drugs Finds Memoir

From xo Jane: Caitlin Thomas writes in WHAT IT'S REALLYLIKE: I'M A DRUG-ADDICTED STRIPPER: Empowerment comes in the front door when I can make rent in a singular evening. Yet, it leaves through the back door when I blow it all on pills.

I like this woman’s honesty, but it does make me wonder what the correct response is from the reader.

Should we be happy that she’s coherent enough to string together words?

Should we rub our hands together with glee because we knew all along that strippers were all a bunch of druggies?

Should we think it’s so cool and edgy to write about one’s own vices while in the midst of them with that oh-so-cooler-than-thou-attitude of superiority?

Or do we examine the role of memoir as it is used here to hopefully enable this woman to see her demons out in the open and perhaps start dealing with them before it is too late?

Personal writing can be used to help people in the midst of traumatic experiences process the experience and see it for what it is. Thomas’ simple act of reflecting on her experience, which she admits is stereotypical in most people’s eyes, will hopefully allow her to understand herself better and deeper. 

Lady Gaga Still Struggles with Feelings of Low Self-Worth

I’ll admit I was never the biggest Lady Gaga fan, although I did like a lot of the songs off her first album.

This feature on MSNBC by Courtney Garcia made me like what she represents more.

I’d kind of fallen into the camp who felt she’d been overplayed and that she was just all about being over-the-top to get noticed, but i really hadn’t ever read any interviews with her.

To learn that she experienced bullying as a youth and is open to talk about it gave me newfound respect for her.

Appearing Sunday night on “Oprah’s Next Chapter” on Winfrey's OWN network, the singer discussed being bullied as a kid and the impact it’s had on her self-esteem and personal call-to-action as a celebrity activist. The singer says schoolmates threw trash at her and called her a “slut,” and those memories inspire her to promote empowerment through her music and to further anti-bullying initiatives.

“All the praise you receive, something inside of you is scarred by those experiences,” said the 25-year-old singer. “Sometimes I feel worthless.”

The fact that a success like Lady Gaga can still experience feelings of low self-worth even after all she has achieved tells me a lot about how important our early experiences are in making us who we are.

There is something so cathartic about looking at the stories of our lives from the place where we are today. Some artists do their digging through memoir or songwriting and singing or visual arts or dance.

It doesn’t matter what venue or genre we choose to examine our lives—it just seems to matter that we open ourselves to all our stories, both positive and negative—to really come to peace with ourselves, even as we may still struggle with less than perfect feelings about ourselves at times.