Good Enough

When it comes to how we feel about our bodies, it sometimes feels like we, as women, will never be happy. There’s always something that could be improved, from our pesky love handles that just won’t let go of the bulk to a muscle that we know is just waiting to pop out, if it weren’t covered by a layer of fat. Regardless of how hard we try or how well we eat, we always end up wishing for someone else’s body.

We’re all guilty of it: admiring someone with a ‘perfect’ body and wondering what it must be like to walk around every day looking so wonderful. We never consider, or see for that matter, the effort and pain that go into all that perfection. Maybe they spend hours each day at the gym or they have a personal trainer. Perhaps they never eat dessert, alcohol or carbs and inspect, weigh and measure every morsel of food that goes in their mouth. There’s no way to know, which is why we never really give consideration to the road leading to perfection. From where we sit, being perfect just seems to come naturally to some people.

Is there anyone who really and truly loves every part of their body? I haven’t met one yet, at least not one over the age of 5.

I often wonder what it would be like to go back to being a child again, basking in the happiness of my lack of body consciousness. Remember what that was like? You never gave consideration to how big your butt looked in jeans or whether your belly pudge was visible in your outfit. Your body was a vehicle to propel you to the other side of the playground, not something you inspected in the mirror for cellulite. It was that pure innocence, that lack of awareness that you were primarily judged by your looks, which made being a child so beautiful.

Once that great time known as puberty arrives, things quickly change from innocence to awkwardness. Your physical attributes were up for judgment and soon the thoughts about how others viewed you became painfully real. My chest wasn’t big enough (OK, maybe it was non-existent), my legs were too skinny, my hair was too crazy and my face had far too many zits. You could say I was quite the looker. Life sometimes deals us a painful hand when we don’t fit in; it’s just part of the process.

Today I look back at junior high and high school as one big, however painful, lesson. The wisdom that comes with growing older makes me realize how much time I dutifully wasted on trying to impress boys and wishing, even praying every night, that I had a bigger chest. Did I seriously think God had time to consider my chest size?

Being so self-conscious, lamenting over not having a butt and attempting to tame my crazy hair was the equivalent of treading water in the middle of the ocean. Simply trying to stay afloat, just getting by, gets us nowhere and after a while, becomes very tiring. It is truly exhausting to spend every waking hour feeling self-conscious about your body.

The adult world, in reality, isn’t all that much different than our junior high and high school tribulations. We’re still primarily judged by our looks and inspected for our flaws on a daily basis. Some of us still feel really, really awkward about our bodies. The difference is we’ve already gone through it once and we now have the maturity and quick-thinking to formulate snappy comebacks and witty one-liners to those same bullies from our playground days. Heck, even those things that you once considered to be terrible aren’t so bad once you let 10 years pass. The pair of stilts I call legs don’t look half bad these days, but the zits still don’t seem to be in vogue just yet. I’m still holding out hope, though.