How many of you have genuinely high self esteem regarding your looks?

I know I'm not some great, classic beauty, I know my looks are polarizing, but I've never disliked my body/face/hair/etc. Even during puberty, there was always something about my physical presentation that pleased me.

I've been curious as to why I'm incapable of judging my physical features harshly or comparing myself to The Ideal, and I can only speculate its because my mom went HARD on developing my self esteem when I was a child.

I'm biracial (Afro-Caribe, Italian), and I grew up in a very homogenized rural Midwestern community full of Swedish and German descendants. I think she saw the writing on the wall, so some of my earliest memories are of my mom I guess...preparing me that I'll look different from my friends, I will stand out, people might say something, and thats ok; I'm still loveable/funny/cute/smart/pretty/talented/etc. Couple that with my mom's lessons in beauty/fashion/fitness/self care, I entered puberty and delighted in being the "exotic one". By the time I came out on the other side I had developed a positive self perception thats largely unshakable.

Now I'm 40 year old mom with a couple of chronic illnesses and I still think I'm hot shit, lol.

Sometimes I feel like an alien, with how much I like how I look. I also know my self love more often than not bleeds into vanity; however I think women should possess more vanity. Too many voices in this world try to tell us we're wrong or not enough...well, fuck them. If you wanna get deep with it, I think the cross religious warnings against vanity are a specific tool of patriarchal oppression buuuut thats a discussion for another day.

Anyway, what say you? Are you feeling yourself? And if not, what do you think it would take for you to look in the mirror and think, hell yeah, I still got it.