If you are following me on instagram or twitter, you might have started noticing that I posted a lot of “selfies” lately. Lots of people might look at those photos and think “geez, she loves herself eh?” or think that it’s narcissistic but truth is, taking selfies are the hardest thing in the world for me.

Ella Photography (or more specifically – the O’so lovely boudoir brand) was built with the philosophy based on “making everyone feel beautiful” from the very start. When I first started Ella Photography, my goal was (and still is) to stop making girls and women everywhere compare themselves to others and to finally see themselves in a new light. You are beautiful, now. Not after those extra 5 pounds. The women in the magazines shouldn’t be a goal in your mind. They aren’t even real! As I started, I wanted to show the world that being beautiful is a state of mind and it didn’t mean that you needed to lose the weight that you have been dreading for years. Believing that you are beautiful IS being beautiful. I wanted to do my part in the world.

However in the last year, I haven’t been feeling that way myself. It seems that, what had started as a goal for women everywhere, became a goal for myself.

Extremely personal posts unfolding

Back story – 3 and a half years ago, I was diagnosed with graves disease. A thyroid condition that apparently is taking over my family at this point. My sister got it before me and my mother got it after me. And it’s not known to be genetic. Graves disease isn’t cancer. It’s an autoimmune disease that could be regulated with meds. Graves is also what causes hyperthyroidism, which affects the thyroid’s hormone activity and balance within your body. Doesn’t seem like much, but the thyroid is what controls EVERYTHING in your body. You should read about it because it’s extremely important. Millions of women (and men) all over the world have it and don’t even know about it. There are two forms of it. HYPER which is when your thyroid produces way too fast which can cause stress, rapid heartbeat which can lead to heart attacks, losing weight, anxiety, tremors etc.. and HYPO which means that it produces too slow causing fatigue, low energy, depression, dangerously slow heart rate, weight gain etc. (win-win isn’t it?)

Doctors don’t normally test for this. It’s missed a lot. When diagnosed, it can be regulated with meds through trial and error. What I mean by that is, that depending on your stress levels, medication can vary since you might need more or less pills. But I digress. Why don’t these doctors test for hyperthyroidism regularly though? Well, millions of women (and men) aren’t tested for this because doctors will often disregard the symptoms as stress. Things like : being nervous all the time (or tired all the time) having shortness of breath, having palpitations and being irritated all the time (or being depressed). The thyroid deals with the HORMONE levels in your body and… I’m not joking by the way, this is a very serious matter … doctors usually dismiss the symptoms to “but she’s a woman”.

How did I get diagnosed?

As I first started getting sick, I was working for a retail chain. AND I HATED IT. When I mean hated it… I mean I HATED IT. The mediocre tasks, the people, the brand, nothing fit.

I would get into work upset, leave work upset, have nightmares about the fact that I hated my job. At one point, This job was literally getting me sick. Nosebleeds, vomiting, weird heart palpitations (Really. It felt like my heart wanted to jump out of my chest a few times a day for a few seconds) I would cry all the time for weird reasons. My body became weak. I would take the stairs rather than the elevator (it was 4 steps) and I would have to stop at the top for 15 minutes because I was completely out of breath. I felt like I ran a marathon. While working at this job, I also started having fights with my boyfriend. I got snappy all the time, I started fights for no reason, I was irritated with EVERYTHING he did. Basically, I was a bitch. At this point, he thought I was just being a woman. I thought I just was unhappy with my life at that moment. You might be thinking that too right now. “well, my girlfriend is snappish with me sometimes and other times you just can’t talk to her” Just being a woman. Doctors think that all the time. Until it started getting really bad. I finally decided to go see a doctor when I started feeling like someone else. My emotions were so all over the place that I felt like a stranger in my own body. I have this distinct memory of myself leaning over the bathroom sink and looking in the mirror crying (for no reason) and thinking “Who the hell are you? This is not me!” This wasn’t stress. This wasn’t normal women feelings. I finally went to a doctor about it and THANK GOODNESS he got an instinct to test my thyroid. And it came back positive for Graves. My thyroid was so FAST that he compared it to me jogging all day EVERYDAY. Your heart rate is 60 on a normal day. Mine was 95. It was like being on speed all the time. Except my physical body couldn’t move fast enough to compensate. By going up the stairs, it went up to 120-150. If I would have not gotten tested, I could have eventually had a heart attack. My job was literally killing me.

That was a serious backstory. I’m sorry. But I feel like I had to share that in order to get to the other part, which was the point of this actual blog post.

You would think that I would have gotten a clue to get tested for Graves, given that my older sister was diagnosed with it a few years back. However, she is a pretty private person and doesn’t share details of her feelings which didn’t let me know how bonkers your hormones can go. When she was diagnosed, the doctor told her to get a radioactive treatment which would basically “Shock the thyroid gland back into normal rhythm”. However, when they “zapped” her, they ended up killing the gland all together. Opps. Now she has to take a pill a day for the rest of her life to make sure she gets the right amount of hormones everyday. Thanks doc! A few months after that, she started having weird – I guess we could call them – side effects to her eyes (exophthalmos). Well, at least I thought they were side effects. At the time, my sister had told me that apparently getting the radioactive treatment could cause her eyes to slowly bulge out. And the doctor had not told her this PRIOR to the treatment. Turns out, that a small pocket of tissue was forming behind her eyes forcing them to bulge out of her head. It also causes your muscles to become weak and you end up with double vision. Doctors have no idea why this happens… but sometimes it just happens. Yay for doctors again.

When I got diagnosed, years later, and I was offered the treatment option, you can believe that I said “NO WAY”. There’s no way that I wanted to a) get treated with radioactive crap b) have the slightest chance that my eyes bulge out of my face and go through all the surgeries that my sister had to go through in order to TRY to put them back into place. So instead, I went for the pills to try to treat the hyperthyroidism. I was taking 6 pills a day in order to try and calm my thyroid down a little. That had to vary because some days you need more (cause you are stressed) and some days you need less (cause you feel better). Extremely hard to regulate. Didn’t matter. At least I knew and understood what was happening to my body and I didn’t have to risk my face in the process. So I worked at it… hard. I’m a huge believer that everything starts in the brain/mind. My goal was to get better by believing that I would get better. I, thankfully, got laid off that job, taught myself to accept life as it comes, I learned to control stress in my body and am happy to report that I cured my graves on my own. No more pills. I was able to regulate my own thyroid problem and have been monitored for 11 months now without the use of surgeries, treatments or meds.

I was finally back to normal until… Turns out, the eye thing happens at random. Has nothing to do with the radioactive treatment. One day, I started having intense headaches. Went to the eye doctor and they saw nothing. Headaches, eye doc again.. Might be a slight change in your sight. Change glasses. Then in the mornings, I started seeing double when I was really tired. Eye doctors sees nothing. Yay for eye doctors. So I went to the ophthalmologist. Turns out my eyesight went up. From -2.5 to -.05. My eyes got BETTER? Something that usually happens to 40 year olds before it starts getting really worst. Yay me. Except .. “seems like your eyes are bulging a little”. What? Sh*t. It’s happening. From this point on, I never took off my glasses in public again. No, It’s not because I need them. My eyesight is actually near perfect (for now). It’s because I started feeling self-conscious. Self-conscious that people would think I looked weird. Looked ugly. I always valued my eyes when I was growing up. It was actually something that I LIKED about myself.. and now it was all going to sh*ts.

At this point, I had built my company on a foundation of making people feel beautiful, however, I started feeling like the exact opposite of that I was trying to teach. My face was changing and it was completely out of my control. I didn’t know how to deal with it. Didn’t want to talk about it either. I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to have to SHOW my face when people said “What the hell are you talking about… Take off your glasses and show me” So, instead, I hid behind my glasses. Because behind them, you can’t really see that my eyes bulge. So people just see you… as you are. For about a year, I lived with the reality that I didn’t feel beautiful. Which made my brand stronger but myself weaker. By making everyone else feel good about themselves, I was constantly reminding myself that I didn’t feel that way at all.

Sometimes I would just look at myself in the mirror and just stare at my eyes and get mad. Why is it so hard to accept yourself as you are? This is what I was going to look like from now on and I had to learn to accept it. There’s no cure, and there’s no stopping it. No, really. When I went to the doctor to have a surgery to try to fix it he said -“We can’t do it now, We have to wait until the eyes finish bulging out and then we can see if we can fix the damage” When? -“Oh.. maybe a year or two.. not sure” Score one for science. As time went on, I didn’t want to even be in photos anymore. I found myself looking at old pictures of myself from back when I was pretty. However, I didn’t value it then. Why couldn’t I just stay that way? I didn’t even have time to appreciate the body I had when I had it and now it’s turning into something else. It’s really unacceptable how awful we women are to ourselves. We are so hard on our psyche, it’s crazy.

As 2013 came around, I decided to make a change. Finally doing as I preach. Learning to love myself as I am now. And starting to finally show my face in public places again. So I studied my options. The goal wasn’t to alter what I hated so much about myself but to help myself see myself, differently. That’s a lot of “myself” in that sentence, but you get it.

So, I decided to change my hair. First, I started with bangs. Never had bangs in my life. (photo above)

I cut them myself on a whim after seeing a daily grace video. If you don’t know her.. she’s really funny. Check her out.

And then, today. My friend kim came over and dyed my hair.

As kim finished my hair, something came over me. I hadn’t even seen myself in the mirror yet but I felt a boost of confidence that I didn’t feel in almost 2 years. After the hair was set… I did it. I stepped out of the house, without my glasses. And I felt awesome about it. I even spoke to someone for 15 minutes in the sunlight. They could clearly see my face! And I was ok with it. Although all this might seem like little changes to you, they are big steps for me. Finally deciding to accept my life as it is now is something that I was trying to avoid for years in the hopes that my eyes actually wouldn’t start bulging out. Hiding behind a pair of glasses and hating my face was slowly bringing me back to the life I worked so hard to fix when I had graves. A life with stress, anxiety and meds.

Everyone has steps to take to be able to feel good about themselves. It might be getting a new hair cut to try to compliment your face rather than hiding it or just talking out loud to admit something to yourself that you’ve been hiding for a while. Whatever that thing may be, know that understanding your body and yourself is key into finally believing that you are beautiful. I didn’t change my face, I didn’t lose 5 pounds to make those jeans fit my butt. I simply changed my perception of myself. I sat down and finally started believing that I can be beautiful if I feel like being beautiful. I took what I already had but started seeing it differently.

The real goal here is to finally realize that all of this is stupid. That you are indeed the only one that is noticing the little changes in your body because you are focusing on them. Today, you might feel one way and tomorrow you might start focusing on another part of your body. The perception that we have on ourselves in based on subjective facts that magazines and the media is telling us to focus on. Our bodies change every 7 years naturally and, although it might be something that’s really hard to accept sometimes … it’s life and we can’t let it stop ourselves in believing that we are beautiful regardless. However, it does happen. Through proof of this post, it happens to me as well. A lot. I’m not sitting here and telling you about my struggles at 2 am because I want you to write in the comments things like “you are so silly isa! you are beautiful” or “I never even noticed your face.. i don’t know what you are talking about”. I do not care about those comments. I don’t care because no matter what you say, It doesn’t change how I see myself in the mirror. I’m actually completely terrified to write this because most of you probably never noticed my face and now… you will… because you know. I wanted to write this because I wanted to explain that although my life might seem perfect and dandy all the time behind this blog, that I too suffer through struggles like you in silence. And there’s too many other people (especially women) like me around you as well. It’s time to take notice. Just because I advocate the power of feeling beautiful as easy, I understand that it’s not. And that if you do feel like your self-doubt goes beyond what you are capable of handling, don’t be afraid to talk about it to those close to you, because it could indeed be more than you are capable of handling through no fault of your own. While I was going through my graves disease mood swings… I felt alone, hated and misunderstood. I had no one to ask me if I was ok and I was only perceived as mean and bitchy because I was a woman (and must have been on my period). We need to stop thinking of women as complainers and wieners because sometimes … we literally can’t control it. We as women need to stop underestimating ourselves and putting down others if, in reality, we dont feel good about ourselves. Notice the people around you more and start taking the extra step in appreciating them. We need to start supporting each other (men and women) and helping each other feel beautiful everyday. Inside and out. Start asking “How are you” and stop to listen up if someone feels like they need to get something off their chest. Sometimes all a person needs is just to hear it out loud in order to start understanding what’s happening in their lives. Compliment the next person you see on their shirt or their shoes or the way that they did their hair (or even on their professional work). Because sometimes it’s the only thing a person might need to start seeing themselves in a new light again.

Let’s stop living alone.