The Button: Perfect Body vs Loving Yourself
I was having a chat with a friend recently and I posed the question, “If I sat a button in front of you that you could press and either have the “perfect body”, but it would never change, or you could love yourself and see yourself as absolutely stunning no matter what season your body was in, which would you choose?
I get it. Many of us would hover over that “perfect body” button, hand poised eagerly in the air. Or maybe our chair would be upended as we dove for the thing. However, I have what I think is a strong argument for the other side. Let’s just say you do hit that button and the body you imagine as perfect today became yours. You may become lighter or darker. Bigger or smaller. Taller or shorter. Maybe your hair or eye color would change. Or you’d want longer legs or a bigger butt.
The interesting part is, what is informing the “corrections”? Is it something you’ve been burning to change about yourself ever since you were a small child? No. No, it’s not. We are not born into this world, matter, miraculously aware of itself, with the immediate understanding that our physical form is wrong somehow. Sub-par. Flawed. Something that needs nipping, tucking and fixing. No, that perspective is something we’re taught along the way. We would be making those changes based on the societal beauty standards of that particular, specific moment in time. Why does that matter? Well, it’s an ever-moving, ever-evolving target that involves everyone else’s perspective, which, coincidentally, we cannot accurately track, know for sure, or understand.
200 years ago, fuller figures and paler skin were seen societally as more “beautiful” because it meant you didn’t have to perform hard labor and you had enough money to eat. Being “skinny” was equivalent to poverty. In the 70s being stick thin was all the rage. Around the early 2000s, having sleek muscles and a bigger butt came roaring to popularity. And now, with social media as the backdrop to our world, those trends are fading in and out faster than ever. I mean, have y’all seen eyebrows over the past 4 years!?! Fluffy? Laminated? Severe? They’ve all had their turn in the beauty standard spotlight. So let’s just say you took the bait and permanently embodied today’s “perfect body”. What do you do when next year, the standard changes again? And again? And again? You’re stuck with a body you still don’t love, while society has moved on. Chasing yet another rabbit down the never=ending beauty hole.
Ultimately, the reason we feel this way is mostly out of our control. We are being fed hundreds of messages a day that bleed into our cognitive understanding of our value and worth. Those messages are then backed by social media, which makes it even more acceptable. At which point, it trickles down to our peers and instead of comparing our bodies with models like back in the 90s, we now compare them to the filtered, posed photos of our friends.
More importantly, as those hypothetical “corrections” took place, I wonder what we’d each be losing? The beautiful way your gums show when you’re really smiling. The lines around your eyes that are only built through laughter. The marks on your skin from afternoons in the sun. The cowlick that’s the exact same as your Father’s. The mole that matches your Mother’s. The scar from falling off a skateboard when you were young and trying something new. The stretch marks that whisper the evidence of the baby you carried. All of the little, beautiful details that make up who you are and tell your story.
There’s nothing wrong with having goals and wanting to change things about your physical appearance. What’s wrong is when you believe your value and worth are attached to those changes. What if when you saw your stretch marks, they reminded you of standing on a mountain top with a stunning view of rivers twisting and weaving together? Or when your stomach folded over your jeans, it reminded you of sun glinting off ripples in the ocean? These ideas are so foreign because we have been so conditioned to only view those physical characteristics as wholly flawed. We’ve assigned a value to it, and it isn’t good.
But what if we could change our minds? What if we could begin to look upon our unique, physical characteristics as truly beautiful? I believe that perspective would begin to heal our souls. It would usher in a confidence around how we engage with and relate to the world. And if we felt like we were proud to be ourselves, I wonder what we would see, experience and create? Can you imagine how beautiful a world that would be? I’d certainly want to be a part of it.
I challenge you to look into your eyes in the mirror today. Breathe slow and deep and stay there for 2-3 mins. Take in all of the stunning details of your physical form and when you feel the voice of doubt, go back to your eyes. You are a dazzling, one-of-a-kind soul. The only one of it’s kind that has ever roamed this planet in all of history. That is who you are. Anything less is a lie.