A month ago, I made a spontaneous decision to buy myself waist beads. How I currently view this traditional African jewellery is different as compared to how I viewed it then.
Over time, waist beads have become an accessory to adorn oneself with. My first time encountering them was from the Nigerian movies I used to watch on TV when I was younger. They were sported by women in the traditional African setting and I never really gave much thought about it then. Today, on this side of the continent and all over the world, all kinds of people don them in their day-to-day lives.
Getting myself waist beads opened my mind to the various reasons some people wear them; and the meanings they attach to them. My need to get my waist beads made me realize that there is no right reason for adorning one's waist with them.
My reason for wearing my waist beads was to make me feel good about my body. Before getting them, I noticed that I had been losing weight for reasons I did not know. It made my views about my body negative. I have been thinking about why I was feeling like that.
Subconsciously, I had been skinny-shaming myself.
Well, I hope to put it into the right words.
I love how people are promoting body positivity. I just think that in the midst of finally letting big and curvy girls embrace their bodies, I felt like I “wasn’t needed to exist”. In a world where social media glorifies the ideal body as being skinny, it just felt wrong to fit in that category. I mean, people are being fat-shamed for how they look, and even though how my body looks is nothing I can change about myself, I felt like it wasn’t appropriate to be in that category per se.
Sometimes, I have received compliments about how nice my body looks. I never fail to wonder whether they mean it or if it is the influence of what society thinks about the kind of body I have.
I have always felt guilty about going shopping with my sister and finding that most clothes are for ladies with small frames like me. She is a curvy girl and sometimes fails to find clothes in a single shopping spree when I on the other hand have a handful.
Losing more weight was quite uncalled for because it made me feel worse. What if people thought I was starving myself to maintain the kind of body that social media finds ideal? Or even worse, had I intentionally lost weight to identify with that group? Did the notion that I have the “perfect body” get to my head? Gosh, I was even gaslighting myself!
Well, the waist beads came to my rescue. I had gotten to the point of not looking at the mirror when I got dressed, but the waist beads gave me new meaning. It meant that I had chosen to show myself that despite the significant unexplained weight loss, I still loved my body. It reminded me that I still matter, even though society has wrongfully classed my body type as the ideal type. Everybody is an ideal body, and that’s just it. All that matters is if one is healthy, right?
Although I find that what my waist beads mean to me often changes day by day, it has made me feel better about myself. Sometimes it’s just an accessory, sometimes something to make me feel feminine. Sometimes a self-love tool, sometimes something to make me feel sexy. It has made me do lots of totally uncalled-for belly dances in front of the mirror without shame (lol) because I like to be goofy sometimes and I like how I feel about myself.
You really should get yourself some waist beads if you’re not feeling happy with how your body looks, and for whichever reasons you might want to get them. As long as it makes you happy, do it! I support it one hundred percent.