I think everyone should take note of Project EveryBody – celebrating body diversity in Second Life where we can literally be anything we want to be. In SL we lose the constraints of our physical bodies, the shapes we were born with can be thrown off in favor of whatever our imagination (and platform constraints) can imagine.

In my Second Life, I choose to be a far more fabulous version of myself – wearing pretty things, comfortable things, but always with an eye for “perfection” (whatever that means). I have a look. I like my look, and I tend to stick to my look. For this challenge, we were asked be Brave – whatever that means for us – and I wanted to push my limits. My first attempts at this style originally focused on my shape, trying to stretch away from the petite, thin avatar I’ve come to know and love over the last year and a half. She is me… how I would ideally love to be. Cute and tiny. I went through every combination of sliders I could trying to craft a shape that was different; hippy, buxom, bbw, tiny, child-like, tall… but I couldn’t find one that felt like me. So then… I had to shift within confines that were a bit more comfortable, playing with style. My personal taste is pretty varied – but after hours of clicking though my inventory and scouring blogs for inspiration it was an accident of sorting (to clear my head) that made me realize what I wanted to do.

To me, this look isn’t pretty. It’s not cute. It’s severe and miss-matched and edgy – and absolutely nothing like me. I had accidentally put on an outfit that I know many would find appealing that outright unsettled me. The avatar I’ve spent so long looking at felt… wrong. I added a gacha hair, the only long hair in my inventory, and completed my look. Putting this on my blog, for me, is Brave. The individual pieces are lovely – I’m particularly taken by these boots, still – but together they don’t suit my taste at all. Then I went a little further and wore it out and about, fishing with friends and even to attend to matters at my SL job briefly. I exposed the people I care about to this face that didn’t feel like mine at all. And you know what?

They didn’t care. And I realized, maybe I shouldn’t either.