I wanna be like the big girls

Good news! It's bathing suit season almost.  I KNOW.  If you're like me, you're dying for the glorious feeling of sunshine on your skin, but not so much for the horrifying feeling of having to put on a bathing suit to feel it.  Does every single woman I know have the humiliating annual dressing room bathing suit experience that usually ends in a tangle of straps and cussing and tears and those panty liner things?  Ugh.  And when do you suppose that department stores will discover that their cellulite highlighting light fixtures actually deter sales?? My whole deflating experience is usually miserable in part because I always spot the sign reminding folks to KEEP THEIR UNDERWEAR ON while trying on suits and I begin to wonder if everyone abides by that rule.  It's all downhill after that.  Can you believe they even have SPANX bathing suits? Just when you thought you could at least BREATHE in and out in the summer heat. God help us girls.

The last few  years I've been monitoring the ladies at the swimming pool.  Of course, we are all in black because the magazines said we'd look 10 pounds thinner, and sitting rod straight so no flab peeks out, but beyond that, the most interesting discovery has been the large numbers of what you and I would consider grossly overweight YOUNG women in very small suits who apparently do not possess the same level of self consciousness that you and I do.  Really, they are all tatted up and seemingly comfortable in their skin and just happy. They are having a blast with their stomachs all hanging over and everything.  They have boyfriends. I envy their self esteem. I think they actually believed their mothers.

Anyway, I ran across this article MSN Article: Are you Attractive? and discovered that I might be terribly wrong in thinking everyone else has great confidence in their level of attractiveness.  Read it if you want, but here's the bottom line: This survey is not terribly hardcore in terms of SCIENCE, but it is important that these folks discovered that out of 1,000 women they surveyed between the ages of 18 and 65, "Only 2% of them are saying 'I'm beautiful' and only 1 in 10 are saying, 'I feel attractive.'"

What?  If I'm walking around noticing all the beautiful people, and all of these other people are moving around like they believe they are beautiful, how come almost all of them report that they think they are unattractive?? Boy are we getting something wrong here.

First, I think we've confused a few things.  I think the pursuit of beauty and of looking beautiful is not a bad thing. I believe a beautiful body is a strong, healthy body so that's why I do this every day:

That's Shelley there on the right.  So, I'm saying a strong body is a lovely or beautiful thing, but where we've gone wrong is that we confuse beauty with WORTHINESS.  We are so confused that I know way more people than I should who are lovely physically and who invest tons of money to become that way, but who contribute very little to the lives of those around them and who will have very short obituaries. We all kind of fluff them up too, like celebrities, because we believe they must be worth this attention they demand.

You may think this is the part where I tell you that I think you are beautiful and it's inner beauty that makes you worth something.  This is not that part.  Frankly, I don't know if you are beautiful on the inside or outside or not at all (except for you, Mama - you are lovely).  Maybe your heart is black as night? Maybe your ears are funny?  What I do know is that those things are not what make you WORTH my time or attention.  And what you are worth and what you believe you are worth is not up to me.

If you think, as a group, that we've not wholeheartedly bought into beauty equaling worth, how come we love those movies where the ugly duckling girl gets a makeover and then all of her dreams come true because it was just her physical ugliness that kept her from being loved by all the boys?  How come Pinterest had an EATING DISORDER section? How come EVERY SINGLE WOMAN I KNOW WANTS TO LOSE THOSE LAST 10 POUNDS BEFORE SHE CAN BE WORTH BEING HAPPY?? You can tell your daughter that it's what's on the inside that counts, but if she hears you say every single damn day that you need more wrinkle cream, less cellulite, fewer numbers on the scale, she's got the exact message you're sending her and she knows even her own mother doesn't believe that her insides are enough for this world.  If mom believed that, she'd quit being so hard on her own self.

I'll admit, when a workout gets hard, I sometimes squeak, "I wanna be PRETTYYYYYY" and try to keep going just for that.  Nothing wrong with that.  I really believed that everyone else just had a much higher self esteem than I do, but apparently ALL OF US ladies are just ridiculously hard on ourselves and forget to look for worth and invest in it beyond the visual.  Only 1 in 10 of your incredible friends can utter the words, "I feel attractive."   I have really misread things.

The article did go on to say that half of all women claimed that receiving compliments made them feel more confident. And you know how few of those we give out, don't you?  This article makes me think maybe the big girls at the pool don't feel as good as they want me to think they do, OR perhaps they have surrounded themselves with people who compliment them.  No way to know without doing my own interview and since I'm pretty sure starting a conversation with, "I've been wondering if you young overweight ladies are as confident as you want me to think" will cause me to get my ass handed to me, I think we'll just have to leave it to speculation.

So, here's my plan:  I'm gonna rock a whole freaking RAINBOW of bathing suit colors this summer. Black be damned.  When we meet at the pool, I'm going to sincerely compliment the hell out of you.  We will have one of those conversations in our lounge chairs where we reveal something REAL and WORTHY about ourselves and we will then turn our attention to the big girls at the pool and know that we are finally having just as much fun as they are.