アレクシス・レンのインスタグラム(alexisren) - 1月18日 05時26分

I love playing dress up and make believe. As a young girl, I made outfits for each day of the week and lined them up on my bed. I watched my mom do her makeup, the counter covered with eyeshadow and lipstick. No matter how busy the day was as a mom with 4 kids, she always looked her best. I remember seeing her and understanding that beauty wasn’t meant to bury who we are but express more of who we are—that we can dress like who we wish to become. I’d have my friends play with their camera and we’d go on walks and take photos of each other. My childhood passion quickly became my adulthood career.

But as I got older, it wasn’t make believe anymore. Beauty became my armor because it was the mask that I was most comfortable wearing. The problem with wearing a mask for too long, is that we can forget our own face. I had to reach back in time and reconnect with that little girl who knew that dress up is not the same as covering up.

People tend to define growth as milestones that are visible to others. Yet, I have found in my own life that sometimes all that needed to change was my intention behind what I do, not that I should stop doing it. I didn’t need to stop taking photos or change my social media in order to heal. I needed to redefine my why, to decide what story I was telling. In doing so, I stopped trying to confine myself to these little square boxes.

I did so many things for the wrong reasons. Now I’m still doing them, but for the right ones. I accept this side of me because I no longer see a girl wearing a mask. I see 12-year-old Alexis, excited to play dress up.

I watch myself do this to others—our brains want to easily define people, because it is so much easier to see someone as one thing, instead of embrace that they have a little bit of everything in them. But my god, we all deserve the grace of change. The ability to redefine ourselves again and again. It’s a lifelong practice. A lot of the times, when I think I’m setting myself free from a box, it’s only because I’ve moved my attention to another one that I think is my answer. But it never is. *continued in comments* —

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