Last week, I got my braces removed… I know that is supposed to be a happy news and to be bookmarked for eternity; and I was happy too until the day after they got off. You ask what could have possibly changed overnight and that too while my mind was not chattering and I was asleep.

In reality nothing happened overnight, it was the broad day light the next day that kicked my happiness’s ass! I was doing nothing but watching my teeth, and I got to know that it was possible to be obsessed with your own teeth. I noticed even the slightest amount of shift and freaked out over it. It doesn’t seem like a big issue but it was because of it’s relevance in my life. 

So around the time I was fourteen, I decided to get braces to “fix” my crooked teeth and trust me when I say, I had a really bad set of teeth. I would also like to point out how potent my ask is when I don’t have a point of view attached to it, I always used to wonder what it would be like to be a vampire after fan-girling over twilight and vampire diaries like a typical girl in her mid teen years. What is hilarious is that I didn’t really get any fast bolting speed abilities but just a pair of vampire canines…

When I decided to fix them, I didn’t just get braces, I also got a hundred expectations of what would happen after my teeth aligned with that. The cute little mind of a fourteen year old, so sweet for thinking how braces would change her entire life (no pressure on the braces by the way). And you know, how there are a lot of before and after pictures of teeth on internet, those didn’t help my expectations too. I expected my teeth would be perfect and I would look flawless in pictures, videos and would just look like a model laughing her heart out instead of a hyena.

Coming back, the morning after my braces came off, I didn’t really feel like that. My teeth were still a little uneven in the pictures, and after fake laughing in front of the mirror endless number of times I noticed that there was a little gap in the lower part of my incisors due to their anatomy, my premolars were a little smaller in size and what not!

I was so engrossed in pointing out the flaws that I shoved away all the giddiness and the excitement that it initially brought me before I judged heck out of it. Really though, what did I judge them for? Not looking the way I imagined and expected my teeth to be? Not being perfect?

Just 10 minutes before I started writing this, I realized the superlative standards and expectations of beauty that I have. And how I wanted nothing but to meet them even if it meant giving away my happiness and the true beauty I really chose to be, the beauty that my body desired to reflect. Honestly, this is not just bound to beauty or the way we look, it’s roots go deep into the personality that we possess, affects the way we think, act, dress, just carry ourselves and lowers our self esteem without us even realising it until it’s too late.

One of my favourite definitions of allowance is “knowing everything is just an interesting point of view.”  Nothing is right, wrong, good, bad, positive, or negative, it is our judgement about the things and the expectations we have about them.

What if we were in allowance of the way we looked? What if we didn’t expect ourselves to look a certain way? What if we chose to be the unique kind of beauty that only we can be?

Here are 3 tips for increasing your allowance and enjoying your beauty.

Be the difference that you are

Know that you are different from everybody else and you’ll look distinct from everyone apart from your doppelgänger. Acknowledge that instead of running away from it. This may seem like once of those things which you hear people casually saying but trust me, it works. You don’t have to go to extreme extents to have that acknowledgment, don’t have to go for soul searching or meditate for hours. You just have to BE and love being you! So how you be? Just ask!

If I were truly being me, would I Scrutinise myself for the way I look?

When you BE, you don’t JUDGE.

Stop the Scrutiny AND End the war with your Beauty

I promise this is not a new word I have learned that I am using repeatedly, I mean it. Stop criticizing everything about you. Stop putting yourself under the scrutiny of your judgments, conclusions and expectations. Instead of looking at what’s wrong rather ask what is right about the thing you have judged as wrong. This is not coming from a place of super optimistic outlook towards life but rather from a tried and tested approach. Can I invite you to try it out?

You can start by asking : what is right about me that I am not getting?

What have I judged as wrong about me that isn’t?

Give up the illusion of being Perfect 

If only I had perfect teeth and a nose which isn’t leaned towards left, I wouldn’t be writing this.

Sigh. Not really, I would still be writing this.

There is nothing such as perfection, it is just a synonym of disappointment wrapped up in a really fancy wrapping sheet with a false label on top of it with the message “self actualizing mode of behavior”.

That is by far the most interesting thing we like to believe to fool ourselves, we are cute as a button! But guess what? Perfection is nothing but a judgment we would like to meet, and truth is this judgment would cease to exist if everything was just an interesting point of view. If we didn’t decide what was right, wrong, bad, good and so on.

One of my favorite people said something really great once that “you don’t have to be perfect to be fucking phenomenal”. That is what it is. Although we might believe that it isn’t true and that we have to be perfect in order to be happy and actualize what we really desire but that’s not the case.

You being you is phenomenal not the illusion of perfection.