Time, Strength, and the Female Spirit

I am a fraud. There it is, plain and simple.

As I stood in my closet this morning in a puddle of self deprecation that was the discarded clothes I tried on and let drop to the floor one after the other, I realized I am a fraud. I dragged myself back and forth from my closet to my bathroom mirror, chiding my body and anything I attempted to drape over it while I dressed for work. It is Thursday and I worked out every morning this week, including the pilates I had just done thirty minutes before I stood in self loathing paralysis in my closet, hiding from my own reflection. Knowing I have been trying to make healthier decisions and live a more active lifestyle just wasn't doing enough to get it done today. So I stood there in my bra and underwear, clock ticking and the day daunting and called myself a fake, a phony, a fraud.

By now, you're probably thinking why? Many women feel this if not often then at least on occasion. So what makes me different? Let me clue you in. I go to work every day to teach, mentor, and role model to 52 young girls pre-teen to age 18. I work with mostly women (we have one male teacher- brave soul), all charged with the same goals. Our job is to teach young women about overall wellness and self-value. Our entire center is built on 9 guiding principals, several of which I completely blew past in the proverbial right hook to my face this morning. Here's the first one:

Honor the Female Spirit:

We value and promote the female perspective by respecting its distinct needs, creating safe and gender responsive environments, and celebrating the female experience.

You could hardly say I was honoring my female spirit today. More like crushing it, or beating it up. In fact, I don't think I was honoring anything about myself. I thought about how my boobs are too big, how the upper abdominal pudge I've been fighting to burn off in the past 6 months was never even there until I hit my late 30's, how I feel stronger and more fit since I started working out back in January but I don't feel any different in my clothes, and how I wish in the high 90's temperatures of the Florida summer, I felt comfortable enough to wear sleeveless shirts. How in the world am I going to convince girls to love themselves and feel good about who they are if I'm talking to myself this way?

How about this one:

Focus on Strengths:

We look to identify strengths in our girls, their families, our staff and supporters.  Using these strengths as our foundation, we build strong, confident, productive community participants.

Really? I talk day after day to these beautiful young girls about how worthy they are of happiness. We look for the best in all of them, no matter how small things would seem to outsiders looking in. You came to us because you hated school and never attended? Well now, you feel positive about school and have an 80% attendance rate. Bam! Focus on your strength. You struggle in reading but you love Chemistry? Bam! Look at those grades in science. Focus on your strength and use it to build a bridge to the other things. Your parents are less than stellar as role models, but you want to finish school and rise above it? Bam! Focus on what you do best. It's not hard to seek out the promise in my girls. Why is it so hard for me as a grown up?

Another:

Value the Wisdom of Time:

We understand that patience can be as powerful as immediate action, and each has its place.  We value the discernment required for their effective use.

It takes time and patience. Changes are gradual. Be persistent and focused on your goals and you'll get there in time, when you're ready. Not hard to say to a young girl with her life ahead of her right? It's easy to relay to her the whole one step forward, two steps back cliche. Be patient. Instead I look at myself and wonder why a change I made today wasn't showing results yesterday. Why do we give ourselves ultimatums like, if I don't see this happen by this time, it must not really work. How is this valuing the wisdom of time. Why isn't it enough just to spend my time more wisely?

So here's the deal. A few of us talked about it standing around the chocolate fountain provided as a reward to the girls during lunch today. As we each allowed ourselves a dipped strawberry or marshmallow, laughing all along like we didn't deserve to eat them because of what they might do to our bodies (never mind that each if us in the talk ate nothing but veggies and healthy lunches daily), we talked about knowing in our heads one thing and how is aligned it is with what we say about ourselves. It reminds me of an Alanis Morisette song, Unsexy. It's about the inconsistency between what we know and what we feel:

I feel so unsexy for someone so beautiful

So unloved and for someone so fine

I feel so boring for someone so interesting

So ignorant for someone of sound mind

We have the right knowledge, we have the awareness of what it means to the psyche to self-talk this way, and still do it. Why do we find it so easy to tell the girls in our care all the right things and beat ourselves up as soon as we turn away from them? How is that being a role model? 

I know society is rough on women and young girls. That's a no-brainer. If it's this difficult for us, imagine what developing girls are going through. We need to remember to love and care for ourselves and each other. Embracing the beauty of all the women in our lives, and lifting them up through words and support is the best way to role model for young women. And it all starts with what we say to the first one we see in the mirror in the morning. I'm not talking about making excuses for yourself and being content with less than you know you want or are capable of in any aspect of your being. I'm talking about positive affirmations, self-acknowledgement and compliment. I'm talking about giving yourself a break when you haven't lived up to your own expectations. Rather than beat ourselves up for it and tear ourselves down, we need to give ourselves an atta girl for trying and encourage continued effort. We need to be good to ourselves.

I'm starting today with 2 affirmations:

1. Stop insulting myself, effective immediately. 

2. Try every day to find something about myself I feel good about- even if it's really small.

Join me in lifting yourself up and stop beating yourself down. What is one promise you can make to yourself to honor the woman you are?



Here are two versions of Alanis' song. One is a pretty acoustic version, and the second is the original with the lyrics on screen.