Have you ever stopped and just listened to the conversations around you?
“I hate my hair.”
“I’m never eating like that again.”
“Do you know how many calories are in one of those?”
“I’ve only been to the gym once this week. Can you believe that?”
“I’m getting wrinkles already.”
Those are just a few of the things I’ve heard lately in the bathrooms around campus. Actually, those are a few of things I’ve probably said lately. We aren’t feeling too good about ourselves right now, people. Ironically, last week was Eating Awareness Week. Last Monday the Eating Awareness Week volunteers sneakily covered up all the mirrors in the bathrooms in every building on both campuses before school began to encourage people (not just women) to look at what’s going on inside of themselves before they scrutinize the outside. They christened their socially responsible protest “Mirror-less Monday.” It was a fantastic gesture toward self-acceptance and freedom from self-judgement.
Imagine my annoyance when, while I was in one of the bathrooms in Luther-Bonney, I overheard two girls complaining about the papers on the mirrors:
Girl 1: “What the hell is this? Mirrorless Monday? Riight. I’m glad they’re trying to make the ugly girls feel better but I still need to check my hair.”
(Girl one rips the sign down from the sink above the mirror)
Girl 2: “No kidding.”
(They pause for lip-glossing)
Girl 1: “Do you really think these jeans don’t look right?”
Girl 2: “They really don’t. I’m just being honest. They make your belly fat roll over.”
(Note: Girl One does not have any belly fat)
There are a million reasons why we feel pressured toward perfection, most of them social: advertising, entertainment, the media, parents, no parents; they all contribute to our collective dislike of ourselves. However, we live in a time where there is a widespread awareness of the effects these pressures have on our view of ourselves. There is help out there for when you feel less than, or uglier than, or less intelligent than. There are groups of volunteers all over the world dedicated to assisting people who suffer from low self-esteem. They offer their own time to educate young men and women about how to exist outside the boundaries of what society deems “beautiful.” Their commitment to helping young Americans appreciate themselves is important and absolutely priceless.
The stealthy “Mirrorless-Monday” saboteurs are those people. We owe our thanks to them for forcing us (literally and figuratively) to step back from the mirror. On Monday, they urged us to consider, if only for the second it takes to rip down a piece of paper from above the bathroom sink, what might be going on underneath our lipgloss and Abercrombie jeans. In the end, it was all about becoming blind for a moment in order to see the wonderful, invisible parts within ourselves that truly define who we are as individuals. Unfortunately for some, what lives inside is ugliness: cruel, disrespectful ugliness that feeds off its host’s secret self-loathing. Lucky for them, there is help right here at the Women’s Resource Center, where someone really is “trying to make ugly girls feel better.”