Trying something out here. The whole reason I got into art in the first place is because I have all these voices inside my grape that want to be let out. Some folks have told me they'd like to learn a little bit more about my imaginary talking totem animal people. So, here we go... thanks for reading.

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For the last couple of years, Bandi has taken a tact of unconditional self-love. He challenged me. It was a scary exercise: the task was to look at myself in the mirror, pick out anything that caught my eye, and tell myself that I liked it.

As someone who's ingrained criticism and analysis into my thoughts and habits for years, this terrified me. It had always been so EASY to compare my physical attributes to published standards or to other people, and to assign some arbitrary value to my attributes based on that comparison.

It certainly started as an argument. I'd see something, and I'd be like "yeah but what about..."; Bandi would simply reply: "or, you could just love it." And no matter what my counterargument was, no matter how steeped I thought my rebuttal was in intelligence and data and history, Bandi would simply reply: "OR... you could just love it."

I ran out of arguments long before he would run out of resilience.