Beautiful

Imagine...
A girl with low self-esteem.
A girl who hides from the camera.
A girl who, when told she is pretty, sneers and truly believes it is a lie.
A girl who doesn't believe in herself.

When we were selecting our wedding song, we had many to choose from. I presented loads of options to Eric but he felt like they were too generic - they'd fit anyone's love story. So I looked at our love story more closely, looked for something that had blossomed from it...

What did I find?

Me.

I had blossomed. I had spent so many years feeling that I was ugly. For so long I thought I wouldn't get married till I was one of the last singles left and the men didn't have a ton of options.

Then Eric came along. He made me feel beautiful. Not only did he make me feel beautiful, he made me believe I was - that I am - beautiful. Somehow through our dating, my perception of myself changed. I had become more confident not only in how I looked but how I danced, how I sang, how I presented myself... He did that for me.

And once I believed myself to be beautiful, others started to believe too. I started getting more compliments, and those compliments mean the world to me. When once they made me angry, now they make me soar.

So when I presented this song to Eric, he knew as I knew that it was written for us. It was meant to be our song.

We danced to it before our wedding, we danced to it at our reception, and we dance to it still.

It is my ringtone when he calls, so that I will always remember.

Here is another tribute to that day, 4 years ago, when Eric took me to be his and made me better for it.