girls will be girls

It’s funny how you can go your whole life without being insecure about something in your appearance--you might have even liked that part of yourself. But as soon as some one points it out, maybe not in a negative way, but they bring it to the forefront, your mind tricks you into believing that there indeed is something wrong, and your best attribute, can instantly become your worst.

My recent mind morphing experience happened while I was watching BET’s access granted. Bow Wow and Omarion were taking viewers behind the scenes of their new music video. While the set was innovative and futuristic, the concept was the same. Girls…club…the end. Nothing extremely original. So while they were in front of the video cameras putting on their best lip syncing performance, their director was in front of BET’s cameras spilling his guts. I wasn’t watching that attentively, but I did catch him say something about Bow Wow switching one of the lead girls for a girl with bigger lips. Apparently he didn’t think her lips weren’t kissable enough. Now, that got me thinking about my own lips. Not that I was worried about how kissable my lips were, it’s not like I was plannin’ on using them any time soon. But I did start to wonder... if it were me in the situation, would Bow Wow trade me up like last year’s point guard?

I started staring at my mouth in the mirror, and it was like it shrank right before my eyes. I went from blankly staring to glaring and picking apart every square inch of my mouth. All the sudden it was miniscule. I knew I never had big lips, but I had never noticed how little of my face they actually took up. In one short week, my new found insecurity was taking up most of my mirror time in the morning, and I was getting on my own nerves. I actually started thinking about solutions to my problem. Lip injections? No. I don’t like needles. Lip plumper? No that doesn't increase the circumference of your mouth, that stuff just burns your lips until they swell up enough to be called "plump." It was starting to look like I would have to go through life being the “little-mouth” girl.

You know when you’re obsessing about something you start to really notice it on everyone you see? Well before I could even really start to get that deep into my obsession, I finally had to stop my self. I said to myself, Jillana….your lips? Seriously? Your lips are fine. Yeah, I know it’s crazy to talk to yourself, it’s also crazy to obsess about nothin. So…I’m crazy. What else is new? So I think the lip fiasco is over. It won’t be long until I find something else to obsess about…girls will be girls.

if i only knew...

When I was little I used to lay with one of my ears pressed up to my dad’s stomach and listen to all of the hallow sounds it made as my head rose and fell with his breathing. Sometimes I just want to go back to times like that, where I could just waist time listening to the gurgling of my dad’s insides as he slept, and I could just giggle at the sounds he was making. Back when I didn’t have to be a grown up, back when I didn’t have to deal with people constantly criticizing and analyzing everything I did, wore, or hung out with. Back when we all made the DARE pledge to stay away from drugs and alcohol and actually meant it. Back when I wasn’t the “white – black” girl, or when no one “acted” any certain way, and when everyone could unite on a playground. Back when I never felt like I was the only one on my team, on my side.
I used to count the minutes until I was eighteen. I remember writing in my “Girl-tech” Password journal when I was 8, exactly how my life would be ten years in the future. Of course I included a boyfriend, whom I am still waitin on, but other than that, my expectations for my eighteen year-old self turned out to be far from reality. In my mind I was a total different Jillana at eighteen. I saw this “glamazon” in my head who had loads of friends, a perfect body, a beautiful car, that my gracious father bought for me— my expectations for my father ten years in the future were pretty far fetched too. And basically, my life was the picture of perfection mirrored after the countless sit-com characters that I studied on a daily basis. I wished I would have known back then how things would really turn out. How being 18 really is. Maybe then I would have enjoyed being 8 a little bit longer.