Fabulously "Flawed"

9e57c-photo This is not really meant to be a gratuitous cat photo, but she was the inspiration for this post.  You see, she makes these little noises.  I don't even know how to describe them.  They are not purring....she does that at times as well.  But they are kind of like grunting sounds.  She's fully awake or I might think they are snoring.  But they are different and really rather cute.  That is what I noticed....they are different, not your ordinary cat noises....and I find them cute!  (Stay with me!) What IF instead of obsessing about our "flaws," we find them cute....endearing....love-able?  What IF they were our signature instead of our shame?  What IF we played up our differences and decided we loved ourselves BECAUSE of them, not in spite of them.  If you will notice, I am putting the word "flaws" into quotation marks because I think we need to redefine them.  I don't know what to call them but I think the word "flaw" has a negative spin on it.  Unique and beautiful feature is nice...I don't know. This has been a paradigm shift  in regards to body image.  Here are some great folks to check out: Rosie MolinaryKaren C.L. AndersonMara Glatzel, and of course... Brené Brown.  There are many more....who would you add to my list? So I'm curvy.  Curvy can be beautiful.  What if I decided to love myself BECAUSE I am curvy? So I have stringy hair.  Stringy hair has a natural beauty to it.  What if I love my stringy hair? So I have imperfect skin.  What if I embraced every spot, scar, pimple, and stretch mark?  What if I decided THESE were the things that make me lovely? So I have a quirky sense of humor that not everyone appreciates or even understands that I was making a joke.  What if I decide this is endearing? So my house can be messy and I can ignore it and curl up with a book or movie and totally overlook the mess.  What if I decide this is what makes me peaceful and unique? So every step closer I get to figuring myself out, the more I find I have to figure out...but I don't run from it, I take a deep breath and walk barefoot through the brokenness to figure out more.  I DON'T see this as a flaw at all.  I see this as one of my greatest attributes.  The messier I seem, the more thrilled I am to learn about myself...  The more broken I notice I am, the more excited I become...  I feel like I am a patchwork quilt and as I put the pieces together and fit them into different parts of the quilt....I KNOW the completed project will be worth so much and hold within it the most inherent beauty.  Personally, I really like the quilts that are put together from scraps and have no distinguishable pattern...  I can run my hand across the stitches and FEEL the history and time and love and pain!  But in the end, the scraps make a beautiful quilt, unlike any other quilt....difficult, if not impossible, to replicate... What so called flaws do you have that you are trying to embrace as fabulous?  Or maybe you already have...