Woman’s Selfie Receives Thousands of Comments About Her Appearance, but She Refuses to Delete the Photo (Exclusive)

Arti­cle import­ed from People.com

Naomie Pilu­la is just like you.

She 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.”

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A post shared by Naomie Pilu­la (@naomie.pilula)

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.

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A post shared by Naomie Pilu­la (@naomie.pilula)

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.”