"'You Do You' represents our ability to respect, honor, and feel comfortable with our oddities, our differences, our unique personas -- to celebrate our ability to connect to our deepest, truest selves and to live a life that fully represents the colors of our beautiful patchworks. 'You Do You' is a call to embrace what makes you distinct, what makes you powerful, what makes you you. To recognize our own self beauty and serve it is an act of great courage... By you representing your light, you are doing a great service to the world by inspiring, empowering, and offering those around you a chance to do the same!" -Shailene Woodley
A remarkable woman and fantastic actress, Shailene Woodley, has taken the world by storm over the last few years. She is my idol, my hero, my role model. And I truly believe her to be the most beautiful and genuine person on the planet. Her soul radiates from her being. It exudes love, generosity, gratitude, compassion, respect and sincerity with everything she does. While I have not personally met her (yet), all of her movies and interviews have clear evidence of these special qualities. Most written interviews even come right out and say something along those lines about her.
Now, Shailene is not your typical Hollywood star. She is incredibly down to earth. Her somewhat recent success have had no really significant effect on her as a person. She is not a celebrity, but just a regular person. A person that gets to do what she loves for a living. But she has never let any of it go to her head. As she often says, at the end of the day she still goes home and does the dishes or laundry just like anyone else.
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"You Do You" is her motto. She does not judge others. She is a firm believer in love -- love of self and love of people, all people. We should be able to embrace all the things that make us who we are, however strange or unusual they may be. If you can truly love who you are -- quirks, scars, baggage and all -- then you open yourself up to give and receive love more fully and more deeply.
I really look up to Shai. She represents so much of what I want to be. She is so in touch with her body, her mind, her soul, her whole self, and even nature and the world around her, which I find to be increasingly fascinating. If only I could figure out how to do that. She knows who she is and what she wants. I crave that kind of certainty. She is strong. I want that sort of strength. She is always so inherently good. So kind and generous and grateful and optimistic and compassionate and sincere. I desire that same level of goodness that is in her. Her beauty illuminates from within.
And even better is that all of these marvelous qualities she possesses make her one amazing actress. She is so real, so vulnerable, so truthful in every role she takes on. I'm an actress too and she plays all the same types of roles that I would love to play. One of my main professional aspirations is to be the next Shailene Woodley. I admire her immensely, and I know that one day I will work with this wonderful woman to create an undeniably wonderful project.
Shailene Woodley is my hero. She inspires me in ways that are hard to put into words. I want to be as good as her. I want to be unapologetically, uniquely me. I want to be so full of love that it's bursting at the seams. I want to be in touch with my soul and my heart, and I want to know who exactly it is that I am. I want to help make the world a better place for everyone.
I want to do me and shine with the same kind of beauty as Shailene Woodley.
(I also would kind of really love to become best friends with her eventually.)
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