“I am not [an] aesthetically beautiful person. I’m not, and that’s okay,” Naomie Pilula tells PEOPLE exclusively
Naomie Pilula’s story is our inspiration for the week, and after reading her editorial in PEOPLE and listening to her video we simply had to share it.
Read below:
According to PEOPLE Naomie works five days a week, goes to church on Sundays and enjoys getting her nails done.
She loves fashion, her friends and her family, too.
Like most, these everyday moments are reflected on her Instagram page, where she posts a few times a week.
So imagine her surprise when a simple video about one of her favorite face masks drew comments like “is this AI?” and “is she using a filter?” After a while, Pilula realized they were talking about her physical appearance, but it wasn’t until the 37-year-old posted a selfie in June that she would be exposed to the depths of the internet’s nastiness.
Pilula was born and raised in Zambia, a beautiful country in the center of Africa’s southern region.
The youngest of seven siblings, she tells PEOPLE her understanding of beauty has changed over the years due to her lived experience.
“In Zambia, my home country, beauty is more the curvaceous woman, the well-endowed woman,” Pilula explains. “And so, [as] somebody who is smaller, I was always told ‘eat more, fill out more.’ ”
Pilula pursued higher education at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia as well as the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
During her time in Australia, she shares that she was the only Black person in her classes – a great departure from her community in Zambia, marking yet another complex lesson regarding desirability and beauty away from home.
Growing up, she says she was particularly teased about her nose.
Through her late teens and early 20s, Pilula came to appreciate her physical features, and after a while, they weren’t even a thought in her mind.
“I do know that one of the most controversial features that I have, which is what blew up the internet, was my nose. It’s my father’s nose. Why would I want to remove a feature that identifies me with my father? It doesn’t make sense,” she ponders.
“I won’t say that there was that one day where I woke up and I looked in the mirror and said, ‘Yes,’ but there was just one point where you looked at yourself and said, ‘I like the way I look,'” she continues. “And that was me. And once I arrived at that point, no one can take that away because they didn’t give it to me.”
Pilula now works as a lawyer in Zambia’s financial sector. She’s developed her personal style, healed old wounds and built a great life for herself.
All was relatively fine until June, when she received a particular comment on one of her posts that struck a nerve.
“I got a comment that said something about trying out rhinoplasty,” she begins. “And I think she caught me at a time where I was really pissed off, because I had received other comments and maybe even worse comments because I had people telling me outright, ‘You’re ugly,’ [and] ‘you don’t deserve to be on the internet.’ ”
Pilula posted — and then deleted — an admittedly “passive-aggressive” response video, opting to call her big sister for advice instead.
“The focus here shouldn’t be on what people say because people will say what people say, but the focus here is: Why is it pissing you off?” she recalls her sister asking her. “Because another comment wouldn’t have. So there’s something about this that pisses you off.’”
With her sister’s words of wisdom, Pilula realized “that maybe I’m not as healed as I thought I was.”
So, Pilula went back to her source: God. She quotes the well-known Bible scripture Psalm 139:15-16 as a central point of understanding of self and purpose.
“So that [scripture] is telling me that, look, God actually put you together,” she tells PEOPLE. “If it’s flowing from my relationship with God and understanding who he is, understanding who he’s created me to be, then what can people say? There’s nothing you can tell me. So that is the healing journey. And I don’t know how it can be done outside of God, at least in a permanent way.”
And it’s this very principle that Pilula had to stand on when she posted a “Happy Monday!” selfie in June. The picture spread like wildfire, amassing over 530,000 comments and shares on Instagram, most of them negative. Pilula says it’s her most viral post yet, and while she thought about deleting it, another Bible passage kept coming back to her.
In the book of Genesis, the prophet Joseph was sold into slavery by his siblings because they were jealous of the favor he had with their father, Jacob. Joseph would eventually rise to power and his siblings would, in turn, apologize.
“And Joseph responds like, ‘No, what the enemy meant for evil, God will turn it around for my good.’ So it reminds me, ‘Okay, look. If you weren’t resilient, if you didn’t love yourself the way you do, this kind of backlash would destroy you,’” Pilula shares. “But then it made me realize that the posts with the worst backlash are also the posts that I’ve gained the most followers. So it is the idea that if the purpose of this was destroying me, I’m not going to agree with that purpose.“
So, where does Pilula go from here? She tells PEOPLE that she plans on doing exactly what she’s been doing: living her life and hopefully encouraging others to embrace exactly who they are.
“I really, really want people to see God. I want people to see confidence. I am not [an] aesthetically beautiful person. I’m not, and that’s okay,” she says. “But I love myself and I can be myself. And with that is a certain level of beauty because there is a light that everyone has and that deserves to shine.”
“I began April with 1,000 followers. We are now in August – I have 20,000 followers. So when I say that this has been insane, I really mean that this has been insane,” she adds. “It’s not me doing anything outside of what I would normally do. So I’m not trying to get anything, I’m just doing what I would normally do on social media. Like it or not, this is what I’m going to do.”
