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Sparkle (1)
Own Your Beauty is a groundbreaking, year-long movement bringing women together to change the conversation about what beauty means. Our mission: to encourage and remind grown women that it is never too late to learn to love one's self and influence the lives of those around us - our mothers, friends, children, neighbors. We can shift our minds and hearts and change the path we follow in the pursuit of authentic beauty.
So the other day I was having a conversation with someone about their body image an feelings of self worth –- feel free to imagine me doing this all day everyday, as that is basically accurate.
The conversation went kind of like this:
“I just feel bad about myself all the time. I am fat and ugly and no one wants to date me. I’m getting to the point where I just don’t know what to do.” [Her]
“I know EXACTLY what you mean, I used to feel like that every single day and it led me to make all manner of terrible decisions because I was constantly on the prowl for external validation to fill the deep dark hole of my self loathing.” [Me]
“No –- You don’t understand, because you’ve always at least been beautiful.” [Her, emphasis mine]
Huh. Now, this isn’t the first time that this has happened to me. The “but you’ve got such a pretty face” write-off. As if my face discounts the size of my body, or my life-long struggle with weight. As if we are existing in some sort of hierarchy of fatness, where pretty faces sit at the top and everyone else has more of a right to hate their bodies than, let's say, I do.
Is there a hierarchy of fatness?
Now, as I’ve mentioned, many, many times before -– actually body size has little to no impact on your mental processes of self-worth and body image. The insidious and dangerous thing about having a negative self image is that it can happen to ANYONE and is very rarely connected with actual size. Instead, size is relative. Someone could very likely feel just as badly about their body at a size two as I have at a size eighteen -– and the emotional patterns are the same.
It is almost unbelievable. But it’s true.
And those feelings of diminished self-worth, the ones that dig down really deep and get caught up around your heart, threatening to take up permanent residence there if you don’t actively seek to starve them out -– those feelings can happen to anyone. Those feeling are the ones that will get you. They are the ones that breed in shame and secrecy and will bring down even the bravest person, should they be allowed any sort of acknowledgement or authority.
Sometimes, you have to dig down deep to scratch away at the layers and layers of hurt that you have accumulated throughout your life. And sometimes, even when you think you are entirely done eradicating all of the built up layers of shame and trauma, something will trigger you and you will realize just how much work is left to do.
Now, when I was younger. And fatter. And entirely consumed with self-loathing, people would frequently address me in a pitying tone about my looks, say, but you have such a pretty face, and meaning, it’s too bad you are wasting all of that beauty in that fat body.So needless to say, this conversation was a bit of a gut-puncher for me. I relived, in typical dizzying flashback panic attack format, a slide show of mean-spirited people who had said that to me during my life.
And what I wanted to say was [please insert 14-year-old whine] -– but I was still FAT! No one wanted to be my BOYFRIEND (or girlfriend or WHATEVER)! No one wanted to even be associated with me because I was so repulsive! I hated my body JUST AS MUCH AS YOU DO NOW.
But what I did say is -– the actual mass of your body or your proximity to ideal beauty standards or your fashion sense or anything else –- pales in comparison to how you view yourself. When I felt ugly, I was ugly, because I allowed myself to live under the thundercloud of my self doubt and anxiety. Once I decided [because, yes, it was a choice] to be beautiful –- I started to be more appealing to people, and NOT because my physical looks had changed, but because my attitude about myself had changed.
You need an example, don’t you?
