Love Your Temple

Today’s blogpost is an interview with one of my good friends Melissa. I met Melissa in 2014 in Albania when we were both on a Mission Trip and we remained friends from there. We’ve travelled to Thailand together and I’ve seen Melissa overcame challenges such as a jungle trek in the pouring rain and climbing a rocky mountain in sandals and I’ve seen her grow in strength and confidence. Melissa was bullied during secondary school and this has had a big impact on her self-confidence and life in general. Hearing Melissa tell me her story saddened me because it’s simply not fair that she had to go through this but I’m glad and proud that she has taken the opportunity to talk about it so that she can inspire others.

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Hey everyone! It’s been a WHILE I know but I’m back and hopefully here to stay. Life was crazy for a year or so, still sometimes is, and I just wasn’t inspired to write sadly. I literally could not pour from an empty cup and I look forward to sharing that testimony some day (still waiting for the rainbow, pray for a sister) but for today’s post I want to talk about social media and the lies behind it. This topic is honestly nothing new and hopefully you will know most of this already but a little reinforcement never hurt nobody!

Social media has crept up and suddenly consumed us. I mean, networking sites have been around for a while, shout out Bebo, Hi 5 and Myspace (Are those top friends still even your friends now?) but with the development in technology things have changed a lot. Back in the day when we didn’t have internet on our phones; if you wanted that sparkly Hello Kitty wallpaper that your cool mate had you had to hold your phones together and trust in the power of infrared but now a man in Fiji can say something offensive and within three minutes he has been turned into a meme, blasted by twitter, fired from work and if he’s lucky he’ll even get a cheeky Channel 4 segment. Times have really changed.

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I am not summer body ready. I’m not even spring body ready because these arms have seen better days and shaving my legs requires so much effort. I’m not in the best shape I’ve been in, especially compared to last year and for the first year in a while I don’t have a holiday booked. For the past few years, I’ve been motivated by the sunshine to get into shape so that I can walk around my chosen destination with confidence. I’m not the crop top type of girl and I only started wearing sleeveless tops about two years ago but hating your body whilst on holiday is one of the worst feelings ever so before my recent travels I worked hard to make sure I felt great bopping along the beach and skipping through the markets. But this year it’s a different story.

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Teenage Hayley

Self conscious, shy, ambitious and longing to be loved.

Here’s what I wish I could tell her:

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I don’t know if I’ll ever be the most confident girl in the room but I’ve come a long way. I still have days where I panic over what to wear and feel like I look the size of a killer whale but I’m getting there. I used to think that once I lose weight I’d immediately have loads of confidence and basically feel like Beyoncé but I didn’t. The weight loss did help but ultimately I had to change the way I thought. Confidence is not a physical thing; it is all in the mind and sadly like myself many women let the voices in their head and pressures from other people and the media doubt their capabilities. I mean, it took a lot for me to even post a photo of myself in this blog post and for what reason? My silly doubts, criticisms and what-if’s. I’m still growing and learning and here are three things that I’ve learnt along the way that have shaped me so far that I hope can help you.

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