A Complex With Awesomeness

My slimness, my iddy biddies, my height, my hair and also my health. All things that at some point in my life I’ve had a complex about… How did I have a complex with all of my awesomeness?!

I used to think that all my complexes were given to me by others who would make comments and repeatedly say the same things to me. Yes, people can be unknowingly insulting with their words and it is very easy to blame others for the way we feel. So easy in fact, that we can overlook the insecurities and anxieties that we have about ourselves, which I now know is the true deeper source of our complexes.

It’s one thing to feel insecure and anxious about something within yourself but when someone else points out the same thing, it can lead to having some serious issues, doubts and a huge lack of confidence. One of the reasons I absolutely hated having sickle cell growing up was because it was the root cause of a lot of my insecurities. I believed that sickle cell was the reason I was so skinny. I hated the way I looked, hated the way clothes fit me (or didn’t); I basically hated my body. I was embarrassed at the fact that the whites of my eyes were always yellow (jaundice). I’d get nervous having my arms out, especially after having a blood transfusion or hospital admission because the multiple attempts to cannulate me left the most unpleasant scars. These were my own personal insecurities, which I just tried to ignore until other people began to notice and make comments like, ‘you look anorexic!’ Then they became a serious complex which lead to me despising and trying to hide my condition.

“They can only give you a complex if you allow them to.”

It didn’t take me long to realise that my insecurities only became a bigger complex when other people started pointing them out. I was allowing people to make me feel worse about myself than I already did. I soon became conscious to the idea that If I could accept all my insecurities, I’d care less if anyone else did. At a young age I developed a mechanism that enabled me to become the woman I am today.

I believe that I allowed people to give me a complex about a lot of things because I hadn’t accepted how awesome all those things really were.

Instead of hiding and despising the things I used to be insecure about, now I just laugh while I show most of them off.