We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything tbat is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our nake skins.GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
From the time we are small we pick up the signals that will mark us for life - other people's impressions of whether or not we're acceptable, whether or not we're pleasing in their eyes. It's conveyed in the cuddling and the cooing, the compliments and the little songs they sing as they wash us, dress us, and show us off. Or not.
Oh, you must have been a beautiful baby, You must have been a wonderful child. When you were only startin'to go to kindergarten, I bet you drove the little boys wild. And when it canw to winning blue ribbons, I bet you showed the other kids how. I can see the judges' eyes as they handed you the prize, I bet you took the cutest bow. Oh, you must have been a beautiful baby 'Cause baby, look at you now.
Yeah, baby. Let's look at ourselves now. Are you pretty? Are you plain? I've got my good days, and I've got my bad. We all do. But the reality doesn't matter. If your mother or father thought you were plain, one way or another, you still reflect the image they bestowed upon you. This is the origin of self-loathing, or our looking-glass sbame, which is what the English novelist and critic Virginia Woolf called the malady that breaks all our hearts.
We are marked in many ways, as you will discover as we excavate the memories that have to do with our self-image. A friend cannot forget the memory of her beautiful mother slipping quietly to her bedside when she was twelve. Thinking that she was sleeping, her mother lifted a slender, lacquered finger to her daughter's misproportioned nose. There in the dark she tilted my friend's head first to the left, then to the right to admire what she imagined would he the result of a surgeon's scalpel.
Sure enough, on the eve of her sixteenth birthday, my friend's mother asked the surgeon if he could make my friend look like Vivien Leigh. He couldn't, but whatever he did somehow fits my friend's face. Nonetheless, she wonders today if her mother would have been happy to have a daughter who looked like Barbra Streisand now that Barbra's proved that success, money, and fame are pretty good cosmetologists.
It was a photograph that marked me. When I was ten there was a garbage strike in our town. For weeks the garbage piled up in front of trim suburban homes. One day a newspaper photographer drove up in front of our house and asked if any children lived there. He wanted to photograph children near the garbage pile to emphasize how much had accumulated. When he came to the door, I was standing shyly behind my mother, so I was selected and propped up on piles of garbage for the photograph. "Just think," my mother exclaimed, "you're going to have your picture in the newspaper." And I certainly did. On the front page. When I went to school the next day, I was taunted by classmates who called me "a pile of garbage." I was marked. In order to handle this public humiliation, I became numb to my own beauty for a very long time. For years I wouldn't have my picture taken; I was terrified at what would be reflected there. To this day I still don't feel comfortable being photographed -and I'm -always amazed (and so grateful l) when they come out well. I'm dumbfounded when I can say "Now there is a beautiful woman." It is nothing less than miraculous that I am no longer blind to my own radiance; it has been a lifelong struggle. You must believe this: if I could do it, so can you.
We like to think that the reason we loathe our bodies is that we're sure others secretly do. (Haven't they been talking behind our backs since high school?) Forget other people; it's really we who are most disturbed by our cellulite thighs and lined faces. We can't believe that anyone could possibly love a woman with a little flesh on her bones. Of course they could -and the right ones do! We may be blinded by our own perceived flaws, but others have clearer visions. I love the relationship in a popular television show between an older woman and her lover who is twenty years younger than she. He adores her "wattle," the loose skin under her chin. It's a riot - and quite reassuring - to watch him become aroused by something that would have me wearing a bag over my head. I have a man friend who swears that once men pass their "breeding years" -- after forty-five or so -- they become blind to a woman's physical defects, especially if the woman respects her body, has a healthy sense of self-esteem that's not based on her looks alone, and loves sex. "What could be better?" he asks. It is we who insist on thrusting a magnifying glass into the hands of a potential lover so that we can point out the minuscule hair growing out of a mole on our chin. Why not just cut to the chase and say instead, "Please find my flaws quickly so you can reject me and be done with it?'
Women have always tried either to flee from the looking glass or to fool it. Archaeologists in Asia Minor have found the burial sites of women filled with elaborate cosmetic enhancements. It seems the ancients, too, from Egypt's first female pharaoh Hatchepsut to Helen of Troy, felt compelled to conceal their true images, camouflaging themselves even into the next world, comfortable neither here nor in the Hereafter with who they really were.
From the book: "Something More" - Excavating Your Authentic Self
by Sarah Ban Breathnach
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"Something More" - Excavating Your Authentic Self
