What We Believe About Ourselves

I was watching What Not to Wear tonight, and they had a sort of "best of" show on tonight with clips from some of their favorite cases/episodes. I watched the shortened versions of episodes, many of which I'd already seen, and I was struck by the almost universal theme running under the different bad outfits and hairdos: a belief, conscious or unconscious, that the woman was fundamentally unattractive. Once Stacy and Clinton had done their work, which basically consists of pointing the person away from things the person probably knew weren't a good idea anyway, and the hair and makeup artists come in, the person is able to see the fundamental truth that there is beauty in every human being. This is probably my favorite thing about the show, that moment when the woman suddenly realizes that, whether she is carrying more weight than the gurus say is proper or is smaller than supermodels in the magazines, she is lovely.

Why is it that we all seem to believe that we're ugly? When I think about my own circle of girl friends and indeed over most of the women I have known in my lifetime, all but a handful have had some secret belief that some portion of their anatomy, if not their whole anatomy, is hideous. Why do we believe this? Where does this come from? If this is true, it means that every woman I know is ugly. That just can't be true. My friends are beautiful people. They have husbands who love them and think they are the centers of the known universe. Where does this inner whisper come from?

I am familiar with the voice myself. I know its insidious voice. I even know some of the reasons why I hear it. Knowing why it's there doesn't really make it easier to combat sometimes. Even though I strive to accept myself as I am, some days, I find myself fighting that same old image in the mirror.

I so wish that we could all, even in our analysis of ourselves, get past the external or just embrace the external that is there and learn to love it. There is so much beauty under that surface and so much potential. Isn't a shame that we bind ourselves to so much less than we're capable of and lose the chance to know so many people as they truly are because of this?