Sara Bareilles turns 44 on December 7, and in a series of Instagram videos, she shared her struggle to reconcile her feelings about aging with her sense of self-worth.
In the first video, she revealed that she had been “crying for the past 36 hours” after she was triggered by getting her picture taken.
“I want to be someone who is willing to be exactly who I am,” she said. “I want to stop fixating on some unattainable sort of bulls**** beauty standard. I want it to stop taking up so much space in my brain.”
In a lengthy Instagram caption, she wrote that being triggered “got me thinking about how fragile any mental progress I make feels sometimes – it is a sandcastle of confidence and one wave can really knock me out and I spiral in all the ways.”
“Let me be clear- I WANT to love the body I’m in … I’m TRYING to. But I don’t actually feel all that much love for it a lot of the time and that feels heavy and shameful and embarrassing. I thought I was smarter than that,” she continued.
“I see and feel that there is some deep belief in me that if I don’t look a certain way I don’t deserve to be seen. How predatory- the urge to disappear because you believe you don’t deserve to be looked at.”
While Sara said she has “zero things figured out” and “zero answers,” she concluded, “Today my small act of resistance is I’m cradling myself and every other person who struggles – to just bless the parts of ourselves that get exiled and told not to come in … begin again. Try it gentler this time. And let your body be.”
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