#2. FRECKLES AND BRILLO
COMPARISON STARTS EARLY
“Why do I have all these spots on my face?” Returning from a vacation in Florida at the age of three, my souvenir was a spattering of ugly freckles across my nose. My older sister and brother seemed to be immune to this plague, so I asked my mom why they were all over my face.
“They’re rust spots,” my mother said. Really mom! Rust spots? So, when I saw her cleaning the rust off the bottom of her frying pan with a Brillo pad, I got a brilliant idea. Sneaking one of those soap pads into the bathroom, I climbed up onto the old claw foot bathtub, then up to the sink, to reach the mirror of the medicine cabinet. I proceeded to scrub away at the biggest, ugliest freckle on my nose. Well, needless to say, when the scab fell off, the freckle was still there, and it still is!
I always hated when people told me that freckles are a sign of beauty. Of course, the only people who say that are the ones who don’t have them. They’re the ones who always mention the fact that Doris Day had freckles. But they were blonde freckles, and that doesn’t count.
Comparing ourselves to others begins at a very early age. Little babies carefully observe their parents behaviors and start imitating them as early as six months old. Being the third child born within three years, I always had my older siblings for comparison. Life as a little kid is so much easier when you have a couple of kids who have gone before you to show you the ropes. So much of learning in childhood comes from copying the behavior of others that it becomes natural to compare ourselves and our behavior to others.
Television and other media also start to affect our views of ourselves from a very early age. My sister had blond hair and my grandmother would give her a perm to make her look like Shirley Temple. I, on the other hand, had dark brown hair and always got the stupid pixie haircut with the hideously short bangs. She was the little princess and I was the tomboy.
Later, we would compare ourselves to the characters in our favorite TV shows, like Penny in Lost In Space or Laurie in The Partridge Family. I even joined the fencing team in high school to be cool like Emma Peel in The Avengers.
Teenage magazines were a huge influence. How could any average awkward twelve year old girl feel good about herself after looking through those pages filled with beautiful models with perfect teeth wearing perfect clothes and always having so much fun!
Children have no conception of how the media’s goal is to make us feel less than. They want to sell us a product that will fix our flaws and make us acceptable.
I'm going to share with you some of the ways that I have bought into the lie that I was not good enough, and how I have come to reverse that thinking.
Remember, Comparison Is The Death Of Joy, but you hold the lifeline.