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Cleopatra · Founder of Love Yourself Image

I spent most of my life hiding
who I actually was.

So when I say I know what it costs to perform a life instead of living it, I mean it from the inside. This is the story underneath everything I do.

Cleopatra, founder of Love Yourself Image
Where it started

Too much, and never enough.

I grew up being asked to perform. To be smaller, quieter, more acceptable. I was told, often in the same breath, that I was too much and not good enough. I grew up around misogyny that taught me being a girl was something to apologise for.

So I did what so many of us do. I hid my essence to stay safe. I performed the version of me that wouldn't be bullied, wouldn't be put down, wouldn't be hurt. And here is the part no one warns you about: those voices don't leave when you grow up and walk away. They move inside your head. They keep talking. You carry the people who made you small everywhere you go.

The turning

Then I chose to come back.

I moved to Bali. I let myself be in my body again. I let myself move, express, take up space, be seen without shrinking. And something inside me that had been holding its breath for thirty years finally exhaled. The monsters didn't disappear overnight. But for the first time, I was louder than they were.

That's when I understood what the work actually was. Not becoming someone new. Coming home to the woman I'd hidden to survive.

Cleopatra in Bali Cleopatra, founder of Love Yourself Image Cleopatra in Ubud, Bali
What the camera taught me

Fifteen years behind the lens,
watching women disappear.

I've been a photographer for fifteen years. I've photographed hundreds of women, many of them the kind society calls beautiful, models, women who by every external measure had nothing to be insecure about.

And I saw it in almost all of them. The same flinch. The same apology for taking up space. The same insecurity that conditioning had installed so deep they thought it was just who they were. The most beautiful women I photographed could not see themselves. That broke my heart, and it showed me my work.

Cleopatra, photographer and founder
Why I do this

I want women to stop hiding,
and finally shine.

Everything I offer, the camera, the mentorship, the retreats, does one thing. It becomes the mirror that shows you who you've been underneath the performance all along, and the space safe enough to finally live as her. Not a new you. The one the world talked you out of.

I do this in Arabic and English, because I know how deep the conditioning goes in our mother tongue, and how deep the freedom goes when you finally speak it there too.

It felt like a healing experience. How you held space and were seeing everyone's energy through the camera, you were doing energy work.

Vanna Nguyen · Body & energy worker

Your turn to come home.

Start free with The Return, or book a call and let's talk about what staying with yourself could look like.

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