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Recently a friend, who I admire very much, posted that she is letting a streak of her glorious hair go gray.
It’s not that she’s against dye, or anything like that, but that she is undertaking to accept where she is now. Then she asked the question, ‘how are you practicing self acceptance?’
It was a general question for all of her friends, not me, I imagine, in particular, but I nevertheless screamed in my own quiet mind, ‘Are you kidding! I’m not practicing self acceptance! Bring on the dye!’
Then I went on and explained to myself that she has one of those nice streaks, whereas my hair is going gray right at the top in a confused and tragic way.
From thence I complained to myself about the size and shape of my stomach, the weakness of my arms, carrying on through and criticizing my soul, my foul temper, really everything about how I am and what I look like. #humility Except bashing yourself into the ground every morning is not actually very humble.
In a world where we have both fat shaming and prayer shaming (thank you to Simcha for excellent posts on both counts) I think I have the shame part well in hand. I want to look a certain way, and be a certain way, and I berate and loath myself when don’t meet my own desires and expectations.
The stupid thing about this is that these desires and expectations are garnered not from scripture (by no means, as St. Paul would say), nor from the pleasant strictures of my every day life, but rather, most foolishly, from the folly and imagination of my own mind.
I look around at the wide world and think I need to be thinner, and have better hair, and act like this or that, and be thinner. I stand in the grocery aisle gazing at Kate Middleton and examine my own short, troll sized stature and just feel really sad and angry. Self-Acceptance forsooth. Continue reading
- Anne Kennedy is an Anglican mother of six who blogs on Patheos.
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