What Beauty Do You Behold in Your Own Eye?

It’s strange how the most beautiful people are the ones who most often question their worth. Recently, one of the prettiest girls I know came to me telling me she thought she was ugly and that she had been telling other people this. Part of me wanted to scream at her that she was so wrong, but the other part just reached out to hug her and asked why. She told me that she felt inferior to others, and that she felt she wasn’t good enough and confident enough. I was taken aback for a moment and honestly didn’t know what to tell her. She seemed to think that I was the expert on confidence.

Taking a breath, I told her to stop comparing herself to others. This is one of the most difficult things you can ever do, but when Theodore Roosevelt said that “comparison is the thief of joy”, he couldn’t have been more right. When you compare yourself to others, wishing that you had their athletic ability or their body shape or their ability to speak in front of crowds, you are discrediting all the amazing things that you can do. Each of us was made differently for a reason. We waste so much of our lives wanting to be like other people when really we are just meant to be ourselves. And those people we compare ourselves to, whether we realize it or not, compare themselves to us too, something I noticed when some girls in my school started calling me anorexic, something you would know that I’m not if you’ve ever seen me eat. This event drew to my attention that other people wanted to be like me. I’m not even tall enough to reach to top shelf in the kitchen. But yet here were people comparing themselves to me, not comfortable enough with themselves to not call others names.

“How can you be comfortable with yourself if you don’t know who you are?” was the next question posed. This one took a little bit more thought. How do you know who you are if we all change every day? How do you “just find yourself”? As this is something that I don’t think any of us really know how to do for sure, the best advice I could give her was to accept herself, good and bad. For me this would be accepting that I am great at singing and writing, but my cooking and asking questions in class skills aren’t the best. These things that we can’t do, or have trouble with, are just as much a part of who we are as the things we excel at. Who we are is our reactions, our thoughts to ourselves, it’s the faces we make in the mirror when we think no one is looking, the songs we like and refuse to tell others about because we think that they will laugh at us. Who we are isn’t something definable with words. It also isn’t something we need to go searching for in all corners of the world; we don’t have to look any farther than inside ourselves.

Accepting ourselves comes with accepting the fact that we are human. Accepting that we can’t be perfect all the time and they we will fail sometimes. But mistakes are a part of life; if we never “get messy and make mistakes” as Mrs.Frizzle would say, we would never learn. Sometimes we learn so much more from failing than we ever could from succeeding. I find so often that people get angry with themselves when they are one point short of perfect and that they expect to be perfect all the time. Even the most confident people seem to falter when they don’t have someone telling them they have done a good job and patting them on the back. So maybe it isn’t confidence that we need to worry about at all, but compassion. Rather than beating ourselves up about our shortcomings we need to tell ourselves that it’s okay to mess up, that we understand we aren’t perfect and that we know we can’t be good at everything. Maybe we all need to take a break from trying to fit in and act like everyone else and be ourselves, good and bad, all flaws included.

We all have potential to be such beautiful, amazing people, we just don’t realize it. So stop comparing. And start accepting.