Within the body positivity movement, I am constantly thinking do I truly love myself? 

As a colored person, I flip between adhering to my native country’s beauty standards and American ones. Most days, I love how I look…as an Asian. I unintentionally direct microaggressions towards myself. I do not want to be Americanized as it is stigmatized against first generations. The moniker ABG is used against Asian women for making themselves ‘look more white’. I love my features, but only because it helps me achieve the traditional Asian beauty standards. 

When I had to adopt glasses, I felt it was something stacked against me. To wear glasses, to be short, to be fat. It always felt like I could never be my ideal beauty. Most days now, I can ignore those aspects by finding the beauty in myself, but I still acquiesce that I find myself more beautiful when I look more like the motherland. I am aimless in what is beautiful or not without the social constructs. There is this charm and beauty in taking pride in looking counterculture; alternative to the Eurocentric view. But then it stands to question: did that influence me to fetishize myself? 

Instead of even loving myself, maybe I have grown used to it. To modify my own standards of beauty, I feel a thick wall between it and me. There are many things I consider to be beautiful, yet other people will view such things as trash. I am conservative in that I think there is an objective beauty. Some things will be ugly and I will admit that outright. People are ugly, physically or emotionally, and I will say it even if it makes them hurt. I can admit that I am ugly in that sense. But still, I like beautiful things and I see an objective scale on that. Beauty is truly meaningless in the entropy of the universe, but that does not change human nature.