Looking Glass Self of Women

I work with teens and twentysomethings, and its easy to point out how our young women can get trapped in the “Looking Glass Self”. Our culture and media pounds the perfect body, the perfect image, and many girls try to fit that one-size-never-fits-all mindset. Parents may use unhealthy words to motivate and “you never get it right” becomes a young women’s mantra.

But what about you and me, the boomer girls? What about our looking glass self?

I watched a show with my niece the other day. It was one of the many plastic surgery shows on cable right now. I love makeovers, I really do, watching someone discover how a cool haircut or the right pair of jeans can make you feel confident. But I wondered as I watched this particular show: Have we gone too far?

Beautiful women of all ages put themselves under the knife so that they could go from a size 34B to a 34D, or opt for chin and eye and nose reconstructions. All in search of perfection.

And yet these women were beautiful before the surgery. They really were.

Are we trying as a culture to plasticize our outer images, our looking glass self, so that we can hear those words: she’s beautiful, look how young she appears.

Our looking glass self can take many different roads. It’s not just the outer pursuit of beauty. We can hear words like, “why can’t you be like her?” and wish we were more talented, more outgoing, more professional, better at cooking, smarter, more hip, the perfect mom or grandmother. . .

I think that we forget that if we were all alike that the color of our world would go gray.

Erma Bombeck once said, “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.”

For years I assumed a looking glass self based upon the words I heard and from the chaos in my home. It kept me from being myself in front of others. It wrapped me in a cocoon of insecurity. As a young woman I put up a facade that said, “I’m okay. See me laughing? Everything’s good.”...