About Me
A few words about me: I consider myself a determined person because I overcame obesity among many others adversities. Through the whole process, I kept my faith in God and because of God’s grace, I didn’t let depression overtake me. I believed that God had and has a dream for my life, even when I can’t see it.
I like to think that it is worthwhile to dream, and that dreams can change anyone’s future. Because I think that dreams can change someone’s future, I started a social project when I was in Brazil. I started teaching Brazilian’s kids who live in poverty that it doesn’t matter what you dream, go after it. I myself am a Brazilian that didn’t have anybody telling me that I could do better, but by God’s mercy I allowed the Holy Spirit to touch me with His hope. Today I can say that I have a purpose for my life, and I will keep walking in it.
My identity isn’t based on what people think about me; I’m not a result of the situations that happened in my life. I choose to recognize them, but to use them in a constructive way. I can’t describe myself only with words. I am, and so are you, a beautiful work of art.
My God, my husband, my son, my family, my dreams, my achievements, my country, my adopted country of the USA, my friends, my doctors, and literature --they all are a part of me.
Logo em Portugues
A few words about me: I consider myself a determined person because I overcame obesity among many others adversities. Through the whole process, I kept my faith in God and because of God’s grace, I didn’t let depression overtake me. I believed that God had and has a dream for my life, even when I can’t see it.
I like to think that it is worthwhile to dream, and that dreams can change anyone’s future. Because I think that dreams can change someone’s future, I started a social project when I was in Brazil. I started teaching Brazilian’s kids who live in poverty that it doesn’t matter what you dream, go after it. I myself am a Brazilian that didn’t have anybody telling me that I could do better, but by God’s mercy I allowed the Holy Spirit to touch me with His hope. Today I can say that I have a purpose for my life, and I will keep walking in it.
My identity isn’t based on what people think about me; I’m not a result of the situations that happened in my life. I choose to recognize them, but to use them in a constructive way. I can’t describe myself only with words. I am, and so are you, a beautiful work of art.
My God, my husband, my son, my family, my dreams, my achievements, my country, my adopted country of the USA, my friends, my doctors, and literature --they all are a part of me.
Logo em Portugues
"Nao acredito que personagens sejam seres praticamente reais que se apresentam de alguma maneira quase que espiritualista ao escritor, mas os vejo como uma expressao de criatividade, imaginacao e fantasia."
Luciane Hawkins
Beyond the Mirror’s Surface
The plot of this text is being drawn in accordance with a woman’s point of view. A woman that once was obese, had part of her bones removed because of cancer, has many scars, and lost over one hundred pounds.
Well, having said this, let’s reflect about beauty.
In my childhood before school, beauty was a simple matter, and I found it everywhere I was. The essence of beauty lived in my eyes. A little girl with short hair, like a boy’s hair (which her father desired so much to be a boy), could look at the mirror and find herself beautiful. This is simplicity, the way life always should be. Beauty goes beyond superficiality, but do our eyes look beyond the mirror’s surface?
I used to stop in downtown Curitiba, the metropolitan city that I grew up in Brazil, and stare at the flowers and the trees. Just admiring their colors, the way the sun would hit them, and how people would pass by all that life and beauty without even realizing it, puzzled me. Curitiba’s downtown is a gray place, full of skyscrapers. You don’t find a lot of green there, and yet people still don’t notice the spot of life that resides there. At that time, I promised myself that I would never be like those people; I always would see the beauty and simplicity of life, no matter what.
Years passed, and unfortunately, I became one of them. I let the opinions of others about me overshadow my own. The facial lines that once expressed beauty became confusing to me, and they started to transmit ugliness. I was living my days unaware of my own beauty.
Always dissatisfied with my appearance, I would buy clothes and more clothes just to feel a little bit better about myself. It didn’t matter how much I weighed, my weight would never be good enough. I believe that most readers will identify with my history, at least at some point in their lives. People are being bombarded with a wrong interpretation of what beauty is.
Television, books, magazines, internet, Hollywood, parents, friends, not-so -friends…and even toys, all are telling us who we are not, and who they think we should be. By looking at our insecurities, we realize that we are not prepared to distinguish the truth from a lie. Worse, sometimes, we don’t know who we are; we live in our own surface. We don’t take time to look inside ourselves and realize the treasure that is within us, who we are beyond the body, the clothes, our color, and even beyond our nationality. This is the reason why self-help books are the biggest sellers in bookstores all over the country. Self -help books also are the biggest sellers in the literature of third world countries. We are also able to find Christians’ versions of self -help books. Almost everyone wants help to adapt into society. Manuals on how to be successful, how to keep married, how to be a good parent, how to become beautiful, how…how many things, whatever you can think about will have a self -help book commenting about it. People are emotional; people feel a need for help.
In the year 2007, I received the news; I had cancer, bone cancer in more than one part of my body. I went through several surgeries. I was very obese and unable to walk. I sat in a wheel chair. I slept in a hospital bed for about nine months. I had nurses commenting about how heavy I was, acting like I wasn’t there to hear it. I was being crushed.
Totally unhappy with my looks, feeling unable to express who I was through my body, and also feeling incomplete after having part of my bones taken from me, I was physically and emotionally sick, needing help. Beautiful was the last adjective I would use to describe myself.
I wouldn’t get close to any kind of beauty; it would remind me of how ugly I was. I made the mirrors my worst enemies.
Many people would encourage my distorted view of myself by doing funny jokes about the way I looked, and even about death (nobody should play about death to a cancer patient). I had a wedding picture on my wall, and one time we received a visitor, who looked at this picture and said to my husband, “Who is that one in the picture with you?” Since I was thin when we married, I wanted to say, “It is my husband’s first wife that I like to keep on the wall to stare at!!!” Well, I didn’t say anything because my self-esteem was already destroyed by then. My husband, the one person who loved me just the way I was, spoke the words I wanted so much to say. My spouse called me beautiful when I was 130 pounds and when I was 230 pounds. With and without scars he would always see the beauty beyond the surface; God used and still uses my husband’s life to heal me.
Today I am 127 pounds and cancer free. I’ve had a hip replacement with a Titanium femoral head, and I am still learning how to see beyond the mirror. I lost weight for several reasons: I didn’t recognize myself, the excess weight incapacitated me from walking, and the excess weight caused heart problems. The main reason was that I would need to change my prosthetic piece sooner. The heavier I was, the sooner I would have to replace the prosthesis. Obesity increases the chances of cancer recurrence.
You could ask me if I was worried about my appearance; it would be hypocrisy to say that I didn’t think I would look better thinner. So, yes I did, and yes I do.
When I finished with the weight lost, I had problems accepting that I had reached my goal, and that I didn’t need to keep my former weight loss diet. Sometimes I thought that I had become anorexic; I would worry all the time about how fat I still was and how much farther I should go. “It isn’t enough…It isn’t enough,” I would keep repeating to myself, so I wouldn’t eat as much I needed. Due to the hip replacement, I needed to build lean body mass, muscles, but because of my obsessive thought, I would gain it and lose it.
I used my health as an excuse to lose the weight and to look like the nice girl that doesn’t care about her appearance. In reality, I was damaging what was more important to me, my health. My sickness made me different; scars aren’t seen the same way as tattoos are, and it is not that cute to have excess skin because of weight loss. People throughout human history do not accept what is different. If we are different, we will be treated as if we are not as good as others. Because of the influence from our environment, we learn and believe this misconception.
Almost everything that is alive has DNA, which is basically man’s primary part, the human essence. Even identical twins have different DNA. We are not made to be the same. The differences make us unique beings. To be different is the same as being special.
I'll use another example… the virus of criticism. We live in a society that is infected by the virus of criticism. All the time people are looking for the imperfections of others and demanding perfection from themselves. Perfectionism is not synonymous with beauty. So what is beauty after all?
Beauty is everything that is true about us, beauty is the simplicity of being ourselves, and beauty also is everything that is unique in our body and soul. Beauty is like a work of art, it was meant to be viewed from different points of view. Beauty is endless. Every time we look beyond the mirror, we'll find more beauty and we’ll find out more about ourselves.
You should be encouraged to realize that sometimes we feel that we are not beautiful; however, those feelings are not true. When feelings of inferiority come, that is the moment you should look beyond the mirror’s surface, knowing that, yes, you are beautiful. Think to yourself: for me to achieve beauty, I just need to be myself.
To complete this reflection, think about this statement, “Every beautiful thing is imperfectly beautiful. There should never be a standard because every beautiful thing is exclusively like a frame of a painting, a work of art.” Augusto Cury, a famous Brazilian psychiatrist.
Luciane Hawkins - 08/02/2010
Beyond the Mirror’s Surface
The plot of this text is being drawn in accordance with a woman’s point of view. A woman that once was obese, had part of her bones removed because of cancer, has many scars, and lost over one hundred pounds.
Well, having said this, let’s reflect about beauty.
In my childhood before school, beauty was a simple matter, and I found it everywhere I was. The essence of beauty lived in my eyes. A little girl with short hair, like a boy’s hair (which her father desired so much to be a boy), could look at the mirror and find herself beautiful. This is simplicity, the way life always should be. Beauty goes beyond superficiality, but do our eyes look beyond the mirror’s surface?
I used to stop in downtown Curitiba, the metropolitan city that I grew up in Brazil, and stare at the flowers and the trees. Just admiring their colors, the way the sun would hit them, and how people would pass by all that life and beauty without even realizing it, puzzled me. Curitiba’s downtown is a gray place, full of skyscrapers. You don’t find a lot of green there, and yet people still don’t notice the spot of life that resides there. At that time, I promised myself that I would never be like those people; I always would see the beauty and simplicity of life, no matter what.
Years passed, and unfortunately, I became one of them. I let the opinions of others about me overshadow my own. The facial lines that once expressed beauty became confusing to me, and they started to transmit ugliness. I was living my days unaware of my own beauty.
Always dissatisfied with my appearance, I would buy clothes and more clothes just to feel a little bit better about myself. It didn’t matter how much I weighed, my weight would never be good enough. I believe that most readers will identify with my history, at least at some point in their lives. People are being bombarded with a wrong interpretation of what beauty is.
Television, books, magazines, internet, Hollywood, parents, friends, not-so -friends…and even toys, all are telling us who we are not, and who they think we should be. By looking at our insecurities, we realize that we are not prepared to distinguish the truth from a lie. Worse, sometimes, we don’t know who we are; we live in our own surface. We don’t take time to look inside ourselves and realize the treasure that is within us, who we are beyond the body, the clothes, our color, and even beyond our nationality. This is the reason why self-help books are the biggest sellers in bookstores all over the country. Self -help books also are the biggest sellers in the literature of third world countries. We are also able to find Christians’ versions of self -help books. Almost everyone wants help to adapt into society. Manuals on how to be successful, how to keep married, how to be a good parent, how to become beautiful, how…how many things, whatever you can think about will have a self -help book commenting about it. People are emotional; people feel a need for help.
In the year 2007, I received the news; I had cancer, bone cancer in more than one part of my body. I went through several surgeries. I was very obese and unable to walk. I sat in a wheel chair. I slept in a hospital bed for about nine months. I had nurses commenting about how heavy I was, acting like I wasn’t there to hear it. I was being crushed.
Totally unhappy with my looks, feeling unable to express who I was through my body, and also feeling incomplete after having part of my bones taken from me, I was physically and emotionally sick, needing help. Beautiful was the last adjective I would use to describe myself.
I wouldn’t get close to any kind of beauty; it would remind me of how ugly I was. I made the mirrors my worst enemies.
Many people would encourage my distorted view of myself by doing funny jokes about the way I looked, and even about death (nobody should play about death to a cancer patient). I had a wedding picture on my wall, and one time we received a visitor, who looked at this picture and said to my husband, “Who is that one in the picture with you?” Since I was thin when we married, I wanted to say, “It is my husband’s first wife that I like to keep on the wall to stare at!!!” Well, I didn’t say anything because my self-esteem was already destroyed by then. My husband, the one person who loved me just the way I was, spoke the words I wanted so much to say. My spouse called me beautiful when I was 130 pounds and when I was 230 pounds. With and without scars he would always see the beauty beyond the surface; God used and still uses my husband’s life to heal me.
Today I am 127 pounds and cancer free. I’ve had a hip replacement with a Titanium femoral head, and I am still learning how to see beyond the mirror. I lost weight for several reasons: I didn’t recognize myself, the excess weight incapacitated me from walking, and the excess weight caused heart problems. The main reason was that I would need to change my prosthetic piece sooner. The heavier I was, the sooner I would have to replace the prosthesis. Obesity increases the chances of cancer recurrence.
You could ask me if I was worried about my appearance; it would be hypocrisy to say that I didn’t think I would look better thinner. So, yes I did, and yes I do.
When I finished with the weight lost, I had problems accepting that I had reached my goal, and that I didn’t need to keep my former weight loss diet. Sometimes I thought that I had become anorexic; I would worry all the time about how fat I still was and how much farther I should go. “It isn’t enough…It isn’t enough,” I would keep repeating to myself, so I wouldn’t eat as much I needed. Due to the hip replacement, I needed to build lean body mass, muscles, but because of my obsessive thought, I would gain it and lose it.
I used my health as an excuse to lose the weight and to look like the nice girl that doesn’t care about her appearance. In reality, I was damaging what was more important to me, my health. My sickness made me different; scars aren’t seen the same way as tattoos are, and it is not that cute to have excess skin because of weight loss. People throughout human history do not accept what is different. If we are different, we will be treated as if we are not as good as others. Because of the influence from our environment, we learn and believe this misconception.
Almost everything that is alive has DNA, which is basically man’s primary part, the human essence. Even identical twins have different DNA. We are not made to be the same. The differences make us unique beings. To be different is the same as being special.
I'll use another example… the virus of criticism. We live in a society that is infected by the virus of criticism. All the time people are looking for the imperfections of others and demanding perfection from themselves. Perfectionism is not synonymous with beauty. So what is beauty after all?
Beauty is everything that is true about us, beauty is the simplicity of being ourselves, and beauty also is everything that is unique in our body and soul. Beauty is like a work of art, it was meant to be viewed from different points of view. Beauty is endless. Every time we look beyond the mirror, we'll find more beauty and we’ll find out more about ourselves.
You should be encouraged to realize that sometimes we feel that we are not beautiful; however, those feelings are not true. When feelings of inferiority come, that is the moment you should look beyond the mirror’s surface, knowing that, yes, you are beautiful. Think to yourself: for me to achieve beauty, I just need to be myself.
To complete this reflection, think about this statement, “Every beautiful thing is imperfectly beautiful. There should never be a standard because every beautiful thing is exclusively like a frame of a painting, a work of art.” Augusto Cury, a famous Brazilian psychiatrist.
Luciane Hawkins - 08/02/2010
