Safashiongirl: personal

Like most kids, I was bullied. My voice was weird, I was chubby, I needed to give another kid money when they asked etc. What I realised in adulthood is that while I've developed some great confidence, I still have yet to shake off the remnants of my adolescent self-image.

When I blogged I was happy, until I started getting harassed by someone. I'm sure most bloggers have dealt with hate so they can relate. To me it felt like, I had stopped getting bullied after high school and as soon as I graduated from college, it started again. I understand an element of why I got flack. I had gained my confidence back because my peers at fashion school were amazing and accepting so I was a little more impulsive and quicker to make mistakes. I became like the girl I used to be when I answered questions in class before being told by other kids to shut up. I was visible and made no apologies for it. How I dealt with it is not how anyone reading this should deal with it.

I began to edit myself to try and get the target off my back. A target however, is a twisted compliment. Any Survivor fan will tell you (shoutout to Abby) that threatening players get targets put on their backs. Sure, everyone is pissed at the girl who pours the rice on the fire but keeping her around won't ruin anyone's chances of winning at the end, keeping a good player around, will. Survivor analogies aside, instead of embracing the fact that I'm a polarizing individual, I tried to do everything in my power, short of leaving the internet completely, to remove that target.

I drafted tweets to alter them later, I wrote posts that I'd never publish, I didn't show off awesome achievements, I became super inactive on Facebook and upped my privacy settings so that no one could get any ammo. I ended up with a stack of things to share and no one to share them with. This translated to my real life where I was a try-hard, hoping not to piss anyone off or make too much of a scene. Anyway, people-pleasing is a great way to actually please no one at all. Sure, someone might think you're nice or think you're stupid, but basically, you become a very bland, non-person. I'm angry with myself that I allowed 'haters' to get to me. Who people hate is another topic altogether. I don't think that anyone is disliked simply because they are the bee's knees and everyone is just jealous but I do think that it's a waste of someone's time to give the people they loathe, attention. Anyway, I gave in to my critics, giving them exactly what they wanted: for me to be extremely cautious, for me to second-guess myself and essentially, for me to become a non-entity.

What a fail. See, if you're true to yourself, not everyone is going to be thrilled but if you're phoney, you're being a way shadier person. I don't know about you but I'd rather take someone at face value than wonder when a saccharine person is going to snap. I'm going to stop pandering to the knowledge that I might not be able to curry favour with someone. Trying to disappear from haters' radars isn't going to magically appease them. I'll crack jokes when I want to, I'll state my opinion even if it's dumb at the time and I'll be true to myself. Being ourselves is the best way to learn how to be better. If you have a bad work ethic, you'll soon fix it when people don't take your shit and if you impress someone with a skill, you'll soon devote attention to it.

If people choose to write me off then they just won't get to know me. I've been called every name in the book when I've been trying to please people so I feel pretty liberated knowing first hand, that you can't please everyone. At least next time someone calls me a bitch, I'll be honouring my character and hey, maybe I'll deserve it once in a while and get to learn from it. Life is a work in progress and I believe that as long as we're not hurting anyone, we should all do our best to find happiness. We won't find it however, in making ourselves invisible.

am i being too nice

Is being too nice messing with your life?

Hey, would you like to spend your life being inconvenienced? Any takers? You might be answering yes to this question a lot more than you think. Let me just clear up what I consider being "nice". Being nice is not the same thing as being kind or thoughtful. To me, being nice is a the absence of honouring one's feelings and desires. I think of it as the slippery slope towards being a pushover and being way too passive which can get you abused, taken advantage of, underestimated and disrespected.

Women are generally brought up to be nice even when they shouldn't be so anything "not nice" is bitch territory. This scale barely leaves any room for someone to function between the two. I'd like to say society has changed but it hasn't. I read an article comparing and contrasting different gender approaches to submitting work. The guys went in guns blazing and the women basically apologized for existing. Being nice isn't unique to your personal life alone, it will trickle into your professional life and can cause people to subconsciously find you weak, oblivious and easy to exploit. You'll get fewer opportunities and will be rewarded less, if at all.

I spent my life being nice. It starts out pretty chill, you agree to do something that sounds lame or you let your friend go ahead of you. No problem, that's totally normal and I was always happy to compromise. Unfortunately, if you're like me, it starts to snowball into something exhausting because you don't keep tabs on these harmless habits. I fooled myself into thinking that everyone else was also game to compromise so I didn't keep track of how often I wasn't doing things on my terms. I somehow allowed my life to morph into a joke of apologizing about everything, giving things away to people because they wanted them, being stuck with tasks I didn't have time for, paying whenever someone skimped on a bill, letting people take credit for my work or staying quiet when someone insulted me because "maybe they had a bad day" - that's only the tip of the ice berg. I slowly began to resent the little things I'd usually have no problem saying "yes" to. Being too nice got me passed over, written off, deemed a dimwit and having a girl I'd just met rip my purse out of my hands to fish for R20 because my "no" wasn't convincing enough. Fun times. What a nice girl I was living the good life!

Now I know some people are just difficult and changing my approach won't stop them but I, like many girls I know, gave too much and put myself in those kinds of situations. We all know giving isn't about keeping score, it's about being selfless, not feeling owed. I really think though, that we need to modify the idea of who to give to. We need to give to the right people because when we let everyone have their way and give nothing to ourselves, we're left with nada or something we don't want and eventually we won't be very helpful to anyone. Overextending yourself means you won't have it in you to give anymore because you realize that in the midst of being so accommodating, your priorities have fallen by the wayside and you've become burnt out. The habit of being agreeable is intensely difficult to break because everyone is used to the way things were and they don't respond very well to the new change in your behaviour. People will continue to make requests which may make you feel frustrated to accept or guilty to deny. This cycle will easily continue: feel guilty, give, feel frustrated, say no next time, feel guilty. Sometimes after a particularly unpleasant experience there's a bonus step in there called 'lash out and overreact'.

I'm happy to say I'm not letting niceness interfere with my life anymore. Now, I'm not advocating becoming selfish or playing the victim. I just want people who feel that they're too nice to be kinder to themselves and get what they want more of the time. My next personal post is a continuation on this topic and includes tips on how to stop being too nice and start embracing your inner Sasha Fierce instead. If you're interested, do check it out next week. Till then, x

bossypants

The obsession with competing

I recently listened to Tiny Fey reading Bossypants on audiobook which is really awesome. Anyway, I got to a chapter where she discusses the 'myth of not enough'. She says her career advice to women is, "People are going to try to trick you, to make you feel that you are in competition with one another. Don't be fooled, you're in competition with everyone". Gender-based competition might seem completely logical at first so we've applied it to everything. Who's earning the most money? Who's got the hottest body? Who's going on the best vacations? Who got engaged first? Whose baby is gifted? Just imagine adding men into the mix. The idea of some guy loving his awesome job and genius baby doesn't spur up jealousy within me. I just think, wow that's great Joe, now you can buy us a round of drinks and tell us all about it...maybe leave the baby at home though. Why can't we feel the same way about women? Is it because we think her engagement ring is going to outshine ours? Is her hot body going to make us reconsider a donut? Lol nice try but you'll have to rip these carbs from my cold, dead hands.

Why don't we put men on the same level that we put other women? I mean, the only competition heterosexual males won't partake in is trying to score a great boyfriend so why discount them? You may say that women care about different things but are those things really that important if only half of the population is trying to attain them? Sure there are some industries rife with women, fashion being a prime example, but work is work. Last month I styled a shoot with a straight guy so honestly, it's not like one field is completely barren. There are male millionaires who've made bank from female industries by selling us creams to shrink our pores so we can say, what? Hey bitch, my pores are invisible, eat your heart out cool girl from high school!

Despite my rant on equal opportunity competing, I actually don't like any of it, or rather what it has become: a passive-aggressive battleground. Regardless of gender, do you want to spend your life trying to prove your worth to people who just want to beat you? I've seen what competition has done to people and I know how it's made me feel so I'm not all that excited about it. I've heard arguments about competition being healthy and motivating but I don't buy it if opponents are prone to bitchfests, jealousy and schadenfreude. Have you ever been too scared to mention an accomplishment for fear that you'll sound like you're bragging? I think it's underpinned by the idea that an accomplishment puts a target on your back and that's because to some people your success erroneously computes as less success for them. Yep, good luck winning and having everyone be genuinely happy and supportive about it. I used to be one of the women who almost had it right, I'd be like a pinball bouncing between being happy for someone and feeling like I needed to catch up. The day that I decided to stop competing, my head wasn't clouded anymore and I got more shit done.

Now I don't agree with the school of thinking that everyone deserves a medal for being a special snowflake but I don't see competition as a healthy motivator for me, not in it's current state. I think motivation should come from within. Even channeling negative talk from others is a healthy motivator but it shouldn't be about proving someone wrong, it needs to be about proving yourself right. If you're focused on external motivators, you might just end up succeeding at something you didn't even care for because everyone else thought it was the bees knees. I used to do what everyone else was doing and when I got to the finish line I thought, shit. I NEVER wanted to do what everyone else was doing, where the hell did I go wrong?

So I just don't understand it anymore. First of all, we all want different things and second of all, it just reminds me of soccer. Sure, some team wins the Champions League this year and then next year they don't...what the hell is all the fuss about when it's a lifetime of trading places? I feel like, the only people who thrive on competition have this persistent idea that they're usually going to win and when I say thrive, I mean THRIVE like the girl in Super Fun Night who crashes Kim's karaoke party. That kind of attitude strikes me as wanting to take something so someone else can't have it, and that's a toxic and ultimately unfulfilling way to live.

If everyone gets knocked off the throne, we shouldn't have an issue letting people enjoy their moment and we shouldn't be scared to be happy for ourselves. I cannot tell you the amount of awesome things I've never whispered a word about because I thought I'd get some trivializing response that would just make me feel like an idiot. As long as we don't frantically scramble to step over people to win, I suppose competing is just the way of the world. Most times though, I just feel like everyone is so swept up in the game that they forget to see their own prize, just sitting there, waiting patiently for them to come and get it.

birth control

The pill that sent me to hospital

Hi guys. This week Twitter was abuzz with terrible stories about the birth control pills Yasmin and Yaz. I can't say that the content of these articles surprised me but I am shocked that these pills are still on the market. I never wanted to scare anyone but I've decided that I made a mistake in ever keeping quiet about this. Those of you that read the blog know I had some health problems in 2012. I wanted to elaborate on what actually happened and share my story to help other girls like me.

I started taking Yasmin birth control in 2004. The first few months into it, I remember being exceptionally moody but my mom and I wrote it off as typical teenage behaviour. My skin cleared up beautifully, I had super mild or no menstrual cramps and I didn't gain any weight. This pill seemed great and I didn't know any better to question it. Honestly, being on Yasmin seemed pretty awesome and uneventful. I do remember my gynaecologist trying to push me to change to Yaz when that pill came out but since I had heard a few girls complain about its side effects at college, I declined. I was totally satisfied with Yasmin.

In 2012, after eating a couple of Pringles, I began to experience extreme pain in my abdomen. This eventually went away after an hour so I wrote it off and stayed away from Pringles even though once you pop you can't stop, amirite? Anyway, about a month later I had similar pains accompanied by 24 hours of vomiting. My doctor thought that it was a case of food poisoning and it had seemed to have passed quickly so I didn't connect the two episodes. Finally one night I woke up with violent pains under my right rib cage and started throwing up. I began crawling on the floor, unable to deal with the pain. I tried to wait it out but eventually went to hospital where I was put on a drip to combat my dehydration. The next day, the hospital did an ultrasound and found that I had a large gallstone in my gallbladder and told me that I would have to remove the organ or face more attacks like I'd just experienced and put my body at risk of suffering more severe complications. The doctor estimated that the stone had been growing in my gallbladder for 8 years and was quite surprised to see my case. He told me that I wasn't the typical candidate for a cholecystectomy as I was not overweight or over 40.

I did some research, got a few second opinions and began to discover that girls my age or younger with gallbladder issues all had one thing in common: they all took Yasmin. The timeline my doctor gave me was exactly how long I'd been on the pill and it seemed to be quite a coincidence that women in the US were trying to sue Yasmin's makers for gallbladder disease. At the time, those particular lawsuits were being thrown out of court despite the amount of young girls trying to get compensation. Still, I tweeted about an article connecting Yasmin and gallbladder issues, thinking that I must sound like a conspiracy theorist but I quickly got a reply from another user who told me "My 15 yr old sister takes that pill and had to have her gallbladder removed". Just hearing about some of the FDA controversy had me convinced that I should quit so I stopped taking the pill. At just 23 years old with no previous health problems, my gallbladder was barely functioning when I got it taken out. Removing it was a difficult, painful and costly experience. A little later that year, I had to go to the hospital again, this time for kidney stones. I have 5 stones in total that I still walk around with, hoping that I won't get an attack at an inconvenient time. I'm now convinced that Yasmin is to blame for all of these problems, specifically their unique ingredient drospirenone. Yasmin warns those with kidney issues to not take this pill but is it responsible for actually creating these kinds of problems in otherwise healthy girls?

These are the facts:

Blood clots are 1.5 to 3 times more likely to occur while on Yasmin than they are on other pills

Yasmin and Yaz contain drospirenone, a synthetic hormone and diuretic that elevates potassium in the body to dangerous levels

The makers, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals Inc., have already paid over $1 billion settling lawsuits to those injured by Yasmin/Yaz

In 2013, Bayer finally agreed to allocate $24 million for its gallbladder injury cases - however with a cap on damages, girls like me would be only paid out $3000 which wouldn't have even covered my surgery (Speaking of caps on damages, check out the documentary Hot Coffee if this interests you, very good).

Now as I said, for almost a decade I had no issue with Yasmin; I loved it and recommended it to friends. When I found out that other girls like me had ran into the same problems I did, I decided that it was better to be safe than sorry and I told my friends to think about quitting or switching. Today, I stand with the hundreds of thousands of other women who have been negatively affected by this contraceptive and I'm telling anyone who will listen to stop taking this pill right now. I feel extremely fortunate to have gotten away with a couple of kidney stones - some girls have gone blind, suffered strokes, had embolisms or died. Consider yourself lucky if you have not been adversely affected by Yasmin but please don't wait around to become another one of its victims. There are many other pills that don't contain drospirenone. Unfortunately all contraceptive pills are risky but I'd rather take a lower chance of developing blood clots, wouldn't you? I personally never want take any kind of contraceptive pill ever again but until then, Yasmin and other pills like it are not an option.

I hope I helped just one girl out there. Always do research, identify who funds/benefits from research that's out there, know the risks, read warnings and take care of yourselves! x