What if your scars can be someone else's sign of hope ?

You are so much more that how you look and how you want to look .

Your strength, your power, your a survivor, your hope, your love, your are passion, your are fire and you are every positive affirmation on this planet earth.

We think of beauty and often visualize glossy magazine pages and wafer thin models or beach body. We see beauty as superficial—eye color, hair texture, and numbers on a scale.

We see beauty as something to be measured and weighed.But is this really true?

I don’t see beauty that way. I see beauty as the grace point between what hurts and what heals, between the shadow of tragedy and the light of joy. I find beauty in my scars.

We all have scars, inside and out. We have freckles from sun exposure, emotional trigger points, broken bones and broken hearts.

However our scars manifest, we need not feel ashamed but beautiful.

It is beautiful to have lived, really lived, and to have the marks to prove it. It’s not a competition—as in “My scar is better than your scar”—but it’s a testament of our inner strength.

It takes nothing to wear a snazzy outfit well, but to wear our scars like diamonds? Now that is beautiful.

Fourteen years ago, when I was just 19 I had my first scar from my top surgery. In my journey from FTM they were followed by many more scars both physical and emotional.

Before I could start my transition I cried every time I took a shower, there were no tools or binding options available back than my back would bleed and have open wounds Because i would try to compress my chest trying to make them as flat as possible and acceptable to pass as a Man.

Post my Top surgery, looking at my scars I would still be disappointed and wished they would not be there so that they would not remind me that I had it from a surgery or that I had a different past.

I hesitated taking off my shirt in public and still continued wearing sleeved shirts and T-shirt just so that my scars cannot be seen.

I had a whole lot of insecurities back than and Now? I see scars and I see stories. I see a being who has lived, who has depth, who is a survivor. Living is beautiful. Being a part of this world is beautiful.

Beauty isn’t a hidden folder full of dying to forget and fit in, a lifted face, perfect jaw line or six-pack abs. It is the smile we are born with, the smile that sources from the divine inside, the smile that can endure, even if we’ve been through a lot.

You can choose to change in most cases it can be a mandate and it is your call to opt for a surgery or not .

What's important is how you treat and respect your body right now. How much of stress are you putting yourself and your body through each day.

Ask yourself will stressing help you to get into that body you always wished for ?

Hold on strong my dear no matter how long you have waited . Your time will come for you to have the perfect body you wished for.

But Till than please honour your current reality. Its okay because in every single way and every possible direction.

You are already Beautiful.

Emotional pain is slow to heal, as I have been slow to heal.

My healing started with a word, the word “forgive” .I didn’t understand what that word meant until I really started to think about it.

I blamed myself for so long for things that weren’t my fault. My Body was not my fault. My transition was not my fault. My gender was not my fault.

Life stopped being beautiful to me, I stopped feeling beautiful inside, and my smile stopped shining beauty out into the world.

I think in order for us to make life beautiful we need to feel our smiles as we feel our frowns.

For so long, I only honoured my pain and my sorrow. I lost my smile, less because of the trauma and more because I spent so much time lamenting my scars and Judging my body.

When I decided they were beautiful, I became beautiful. When I took power away from the negative emotions, my unchangeable traumatic past, I was better able to find joy in the present.

How did I do this?

First, I made a soul collage, a board for the life of my dreams. I pasted onto the poster magazine images that depicted things I see as myself and want for myself. It became a beautiful visual guide for what matters to me beyond the superficial.

This board reminds me to honour who I am in essence, who I was before anything bad happened to me, before I believed anything was wrong with me.

This board provides me with a path of beauty through the scars.

Secondly, I realized My purpose is to make whatever I can beautiful. Not beautiful in the superficial sense but in the smile of the heart and soul sense. Thus far, it’s working. I hope your smiling.

Sometimes all it takes for your life to change is a shift in perspective, one solitary action, one solitary word, and everything is different—an action like a smile, a word like forgive.

Take a moment now to smile. Do you feel it in your muscles? In your skin? In your toes? Where do you feel happiness?

When bad things happen, we don’t instinctively feel happy and beautiful, but we don’t need to despair because life gets bitter sometimes.

Joy and beauty are everywhere, in everything, in every one of us—no matter how we look, and no matter how we may hurt temporarily.

Grace is beauty in motion and we can create it by choosing to smile—to recognize that we’re strong, despite our insecurities, and the world is an amazing place, despite its tragedies.

We may hurt, but we will heal—and there’s beauty in our scars.

Your scars will hold your beautiful story.