Hey, Beautiful!
When I was in middle school, people's popularity - and by extension, their "worth" - was determined by the labels inside their clothes. And if you really wanted to show it off, you wore a T-shirt with the brand name or slogan plastered all over it. Just to prove that you could afford it. (Ugh! Middle school is the worst!)
I remember the first Forenza shirt I ever bought. I got it off the clearance rack; it was the only one I could afford. Suddenly, a "friend" decided I was cool enough to hang out with outside of school. (Did I mention that middle school is the worst?)
Even though I wore that T-shirt a lot, my bratty Inner Mean Girl always reminded me that I could never be a true cool kid because I could only afford the clearance version, not the real thing.
But it wasn't my $15-a-month clothing allowance that determined how I saw myself. It was the other labels I wore - not the ones sewn into my clothes, but the ones etched on my heart.
Loser.
Unlovable.
Worthless.
No designer T-shirt could fix that, no matter what slogan graced the front.
It wasn't until I did the inner work to shed those labels I'd picked up over the years that I was able to see myself for who I truly was rather than who I was taught to be.
What labels to do wear? What clearance rack of nonsense did they come from?
You can't just throw on an affirmation T-shirt and cover them up. You've got to do the inner work. Remove those labels, and you come one step closer to being who you were meant to be.
