In the mind of a million girls.

I wonder if Eve {the mother of all} was as self-conscious as we {girls/women/ladies} have become. I wonder when it all started. Who was the first to catch this virus of the mind and spread it like a plague to the rest of us? Was this obsession something that escaped from Pandora's Box?

 We berate ourselves constantly for what we lack {or have too much of} if it does not suit our ideal.

I can't sing, dance, play, run, talk, write as well as she can. My eyes are too close, too small, too big, too blue, too brown. My skin isn't soft enough, tan enough, clear enough. My nose is too big, too small, too turned up. My hair is too thin, too thick, too frizzy, too mousy, too straight. I'm too tall, too short, too curvy, too skinny. 

Never quite perfect enough. 

I was wasting my hours at work on Facebook, when I caught sight of a horrid picture of myself. You know the sort. The ones where your "friend" tags you and you don't see it before the rest of Facebook world has already passed judgement on you. Or at least that's what you feel. You see it and you want to gag. You ask yourself, "Is that really what I look like? Please say no." Then some sweet soul dares to comment and tell you how pretty you look, and you silently groan. "If that's what I look like when I'm pretty, I hope to never see a picture of myself when I am ugly. It must be ghastly." For the rest of the afternoon, I couldn't get the sight of that picture {or those pictures} out of my mind. Every time I passed by a reflective surface on campus, I would sneer at the figure there. I hated my body. My face. My hair. My clothes. I was gloomy all day because of it. {Another good reason to be rid of Facebook.}

Once I was talking with a guy friend {I can't pretend to remember who} about girls and how each of us, no matter how beautiful, how confident, how smart, how thin, how talented et cetera is self-conscious in some way. He couldn't wrap his mind around it. It didn't make any sense to him in the slightest. That was the first time that I realized that this disease of constant self-consciousness was something that one chose to take upon one's self. We {including myself} spend so much time blaming the media and stick-thin models and ultra-feminists for our obsession with body image and our complexes about our inequality with men and with each other. But in reality, though there is partial blame to put upon them, the blame it is not all their's. It is mostly our own. It is our fault we are dissatisfied. It was my fault.

On one of my many runs this past week, I listened to President Henry B. Eyring's talk "Mountains to Climb" and it suddenly struck me that for the past oh, fourteen years or so, I have been occupying my time, my thoughts, my best energies on the wrong mountain. That feeling perfectly happy with my physical body was not all that I wanted out of life. I do not care to show up at the Pearly Gates and give my excuses that I don't know the scriptures as well as I should and I didn't become as well-read as I should have or spend as much time connecting with family and friends, but I did read countless dieting books and finally stuffed myself into size six pants and fed myself bland vegetables and styrofoam-like rice cakes until the very end and hope that that is enough. That's not the sort of life I want. It is not important. I have other Mountains to Climb that are much more important to me.

And I hope the same for you.

-KB