My name is Taruri Gatere and I am the creator of Flawnt It.
Flawnt It was born out of totally selfish reasons… I just wanted to create a space in the world where it was okay for me to be me. I was tired of constantly measuring myself against the worldly standards of beauty and working so hard to fit them. It got so exhausting! So I guess you could say Flawnt It was borne out of laziness too!
Seriously though, I have always felt very different from everybody else, and I’ve never been able to comfortably conform. I was always a stubborn child, growing up, I wanted to know things for myself, and I never wanted anyone to tell me what to do. I wanted to know what to do, for myself. When I was young, my body was never something I thought about… until I got to standard four, and my hips already started forming. My friends would tell me that I have a “figure 8”. They would say it with such admiration that I started to become proud of my body. I’d strut around, trying to “catwalk” and pose with one hip jutting out and my arm resting on it. I felt beautiful. In upper primary, my hips and bum continued to slowly expand and the compliments just kept increasing with each passing year. In Standard seven, one of the most popular boys gave my bum a rating of 96% and I remember pretending to be appalled by the fact that I was being rated in the first place, while inwardly I was so flattered!
Things changed when I got to high school. I would still get comments about my hips, but they were more like exclamations at how big they were… They didn’t sound complimentary at all. I began to feel fat and disgusting.
This was also the time that I discovered that the dimples around my hips and butt, that I had found cute until then, were an unsightly thing called cellulite. When I look at photos from then I get so surprised and I wonder what the hell I was seeing! I was so tiny! But I began to starve myself. That would become my go-to solution for years after high school… Hunger became like a best friend to me. I’d actually welcome hunger pangs because I knew it meant that my body was going to eat up all that excess fat. It became like a high for me… I’d feel so proud of myself for only having a meal a day, especially if that meal was a really tiny one. And I would make sure to work out too. This went on for years… in between my thin phases I would have phases where I gained a lot of weight, I was yo-yoing so much.
In my early 20s I had just come off of a pretty dark depression and I was just starting to get my life together and once again I decided to lose some weight. For about a year and a half, I did the starving-working out thing and got small again. I found a group of amazing friends and I got into a really happy place and forgot to starve myself and as always, the weight began to pile on. The weight gain coincided with an acne outbreak of epic proportions. I think my body was so unhappy by that point, it was screaming for me to stop the madness. Because of my appearance and other personal reasons, I was also just emotionally and mentally exhausted. Between trying to lose weight and trying to find a solution for my acne, I was a wreck. I tried everything I could to fix the acne… from creams I bought from Eastleigh, to washes and tonics from chemists… I tried it all. And the more frustrated I got, the worse the acne got. Leaving the house got so difficult because of the interactions I’d have with people. If it wasn’t former classmates commenting on my weight, it was perfect strangers walking up to me and giving my business cards of dermatologists or writing down names of creams they swore worked for their cousin or sister. I slipped into a dark place once again, feeling so ugly and disgusting. In my despair, I looked for something, anything to cling to. I wanted something that would last, something stable. And I went on a very interesting spiritual journey (that’s a long story for another day).
I found myself in my spirituality and I realized that I was the one with the power in my life. I had been giving my power away by allowing other people’s standards to become my own. I was underfeeding and overworking my body, slathering all kinds of chemicals on it just to fit into a mold that I hadn’t chosen for myself. The stubborn child within me came back to life. I wanted to create a space for myself where I was good enough as I was. I wanted to free up mental space, so that I could concentrate on just living life and being happy, instead of worrying about inches and kilograms. And when I looked at the women around me, they seemed to be struggling with the same things… My Mum, my sisters, my friends who were all so gorgeous to me, were constantly criticizing themselves, talking about their bodies negatively and feeling unworthy or ugly or disgusting. My eyes were opened up to the madness of it all… Beautiful, intelligent, amazing women were feeling worthless because of a number on a tape measure or scale. Talented, vibrant, incredible women were reduced to tears by the thoughtless comments of relatives. What utter madness! I decided that I was done with all that nonsense. I was going to embrace my flaws, and love them. I was not going to let anyone else tell me what beautiful was. That’s when my Flawnt It journey began.
It’s a journey, and I still have days when I have to actively remind myself that I am beautiful no matter what size I am. Food has become a pleasure for me now, and I eat as much of it as I want. Because I like being healthy, I eat good quality food. Exercise is becoming something I do for the love of my body, movement that I enjoy; not something I do to fight the fat or lose weight. I want to enjoy my body, to love it like a friend, to be kind to it, not just with what I put into it but also and perhaps even most importantly, with what I think about it and what I say to it and about it to others. My “flaws” are not things I will hide anymore. I will wear a teeny bikini and show my jiggly bum and my cellulite. I will go without makeup and show off my acne scars. I will let out my belly when it’s bloated and I will love every inch of this body! It’s so unique, there’s no other like it.
Here, on this blog, we will be posting stories of other amazing “Flawnters” who are in various stages of their journeys of self-love and acceptance, all with different “flaws”. Once a week, we will share a new story… These brave and beautiful souls have bared themselves and shown such vulnerability. They jumped onto my Flawnt It wagon, so willingly and openly giving themselves to this project. For those reasons I have a request; please keep the comments on this blog respectful. Any disrespect here will not be tolerated. This is a positive space and I would love to keep it that way. Find inspiration here. Find a safe space to share your own story. Find encouragement as you walk on your own journey of acceptance and self-love.
Photos courtesy of: Kombo Mutuku Muoka, Urbantu Media