Not Just Skin Deep: How to Reclaim Our True Beauty
The other day, I reacted to an Instagram post by a friend in which she shared how low she was feeling about not having yet lost her baby weight. I have so much compassion for her, as I remember that feeling all too well. I gained sixty pounds during my first pregnancy, and it took me a year to lose much of it. During that year, I cycled repeatedly through feelings of frustration and worthlessness. It didn’t help that a number of female celebrities had babies around the same time, and it only took them six weeks to get back their “bikini” bodies, which made me feel even more inadequate. Thankfully, this was prior to the heyday of social media, which has only made the body shaming worse. Yet, even then, the Internet and women’s magazines still seemed to bombard me with headlines about “Getting your Body Back after Pregnancy”. These were enough to stir the frequent self-judgment and worry about whether I was ever going to be fit or attractive again.
The self-image issues that pregnancy and motherhood raised stayed with me for a long time. As I told my friend, I wish I had the wisdom then to be patient, kind and, above all, compassionate with myself and my body, which had gone through so much to produce another human being. And I wish I had loved myself enough to tune out the noise and listen to my own needs.
Sadly, the ability to do so is made so much more difficult today with the onslaught of social media posts by celebrities and influencers. And it’s not just the images of post-baby bodies and weight loss but also the plethora of stories about the level of thinness we can achieve, from flat abs to trim triceps to toned buttocks. These images reinforce the notion that thinness equates to desirability and, by extension, our capacity to be loved based on our appearance.
What makes this even more upsetting is that so often it’s we women who perpetuate these images and the idea that punishing fitness routines and tasteless diets or appetite suppressants will somehow make us feel better about ourselves.
These celebrities and influencers, along with the gatekeepers in the media, are constantly “sharing” clothing, make-up and other beauty products we all “must-have”. And in order to have all this, we must shape ourselves into that idealized body.
In reality, this is not something new in the age of social media. This goes way back to time immemorial, when women learned to use their looks as a form of currency, trading on our beauty because of our secondary position within patriarchy and seeking to make ourselves less vulnerable or expendable in a male-dominated world.
Physical attractiveness was how we were able to exercise some modicum of power, giving us access and attention and securing relationships and marriages in an effort to attain financial and physical security but ultimately leading us even deeper into the patriarchal prison.
What’s worse is that with the need to survive our sense of powerlessness within patriarchy, we’ve ended up turning on ourselves, shaming and attacking one another over how we choose to represent our own ideas of physical beauty.
We have gotten stuck in a cycle of self-loathing and blame, and we’re taking it out on each other and our bodies. We’ve bought into this practice for so long that we’ve forgotten that our true value has never really lied in our looks but in our adaptability and ability to create beauty however we choose to define it, not how it’s been defined for us.
We’ve allowed others to feel worthless and to lose sight of their inherent value, and we’ve done so much damage to ourselves buying into the lies that we have long internalized, continuing to consume and buy into every beauty product or theory believing it’s the antidote to our lack of self-love: “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline” or the Pantene slogan, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” We need to own what we’ve done to ourselves and one another by having capitalized on the insecurities of other women to further our own ends, and we need to examine honestly the lengths we’ve gone to in the name of beauty.
These feelings of inadequacy have also been passed down to us from generation to generation. I absorbed my mother’s own thoughts and frustrations about her body after having three children, two of whom were born only a year apart. I came to look at myself through that same critical lens, never being good enough. Even though I worked on accepting myself throughout high school, a good portion of my adulthood and motherhood has been spent learning to love myself unconditionally.
So how do we break out of this cycle? What if we were to stop plucking and waxing? What if we no longer injected poison and fillers into our bodies? What if we were to throw out our make-up and burn our bras? Is that the path to true freedom? While on the surface it might seem to be, I would argue, No. I don’t subscribe to “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” kind of movements. Rather, I think it calls for self-examination and to explore why we believe or do what we do and how to uproot these beliefs if it makes us miserable.
To do this is scary. Not conforming is the greatest act of rebellion in patriarchy, which demands we adhere to specific standards in order to fit in. And seeing beyond the rigid standards of beauty requires us to admit to our flaws, to admit to the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual damage we’ve brought upon ourselves and how, as women, we failed one another by perpetuating and internalizing the lies. This is the most painful part of our growth because it means admitting we’re not perfect or anywhere close. And if we aren’t perfect, then how can we be loved? Who will deem us worthy of love?
The answer is, ourselves. Only when we love ourselves truly, completely, openly and wholly, will the freedom to be and accept ourselves unconditionally be ours.
And when we are able to do that, the old standards of beauty will lose their relevance because we won’t need the outward validation or affirmation of our worthiness to exist or to be loved. Then the only standard of beauty will be the outward expression of this self-love.
Developing an unconditional love for myself has been my greatest challenge. It took me years to untangle my thoughts from my mother’s, to tease out all those judgments and to understand their source. It also forced me to acknowledge, accept and embrace my flaws, the ways in which I’ve hurt myself and others. My love for anyone other than my children was always conditional, even if I couldn’t admit it, because I couldn’t grapple with how lovable I could be if I wasn’t perfect. The extent to which I could love another rested entirely on how I felt about myself in that moment. So I would have push/pull moments, unable to be vulnerable and hiding behind a veneer of strength or impenetrability just to keep from having to face that fundamental core issue of not being love.
Because what I realized is that it’s not about being a lover, as in a source of love, or lovable, as in able to receive love, but to accept that at the center, the core of my very being, I am love. I needed to work through the belief that I was anything other than this in order to come back into Love.
In addition to self-love, we need to care for one another, recognizing the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual pain behind the pursuit of perfection and understanding that, as women, the only way to shift collective consciousness around ourselves and our beauty is by embracing one another with compassion instead of judgment and with love instead of shame. When we are able to do both, we will be able to understand that to be truly beautiful is to be a vessel of Love.
Vivian Winslow is the pen name for Elizabeth A. Hayes. She is the author of The Gilded Flower Trilogies and the Wildflowers Series, contemporary, inclusive romance fiction with a strong female narrative. In addition to writing, Elizabeth is a spirtual teacher and healer.
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