As I get older I’d like to be as vain as I was when I was a teenager, but I realize how ridiculous that sounds, so I try to keep my humility in check instead.
Everybody likes to feel attractive. If you don’t, you’re lying to yourself. We all want to feel sexy, or there wouldn’t be such an overpowering market for it. I won’t lie – I stalk facebook pictures, and I bet you do, too. Comparing yourself to girls (or guys, whichever) you went to high school with, graduated from college with, whatever. I’d like to think it’s only natural. Humans are naturally competitive.
This is something I struggled with when I got married. Technically, I’m off the market, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to channel my inner Shamu and have nobody ever look at me again, mixaphorically speaking. I hated the idea of being off the market. Of course, I appreciate the respect that comes with being newly married, but I still missed being, well, wanted. (That took everything in me to not hit delete, by the way. Putting that out into the universe makes me feel shallow, but it’s the truth.)
This was prompted by a conversation I had with a good friend this morning, when I asked her to appease the terribly vain side of me for a minute, wanting her opinion of a picture of myself I’d recently taken:
Me: I don’t know – I think it’s a nice picture, although I know it’s not a great picture cuz I took it with the macbook camera
N: If you think it looks good, post it. Stop caring.
I try to keep myself in check with a little humor. I can laugh at myself, a trait thankfully handed down by both parents. I totter back and forth from “graceful” to “graceless,” keeping equal parts of both.
Emerson said “as we grow older, the beauty steals inward.” I guess I’ll just keep reminding my inner 19 year old that.
So very funny that you wrote about this particular topic today… And I absolutely adore that Emerson quote. It is wonderful.