Waking up flawless: boosting our self-esteem

Grace Tobin ’18 helps us understand the problem of a low self-esteem.

Grace Tobin|November 23, 2015

Marilyn Monroe was once considered the standard of physical perfection.

No woman today can say that every single time she looks into the mirror, she never finds a single flaw. If there were a woman living on Pluto and she had never seen another human being before, a woman never finding a single flaw would probably be the case. That is because most women discover their own flaws when they witness other woman’s “strong points.”

The terrible reality is that young girls cannot avoid this world of constant comparison. If they are not comparing themselves to others, their peers do it. This extends from a school environment and follows the girl home on television, magazines and maybe her home environment. Females look at these “flawless” women in the media and immediately find fault with themselves.

Mary Long, a sophomore, thinks that models set “unreasonable standards for girls in this day and age.”

Models deal with massive self-esteem issues with their agents telling them that they desperately need to go from what is considered 0 to a 100. This push for beauty may lead to starvation, bulimia and even depression. These very women that are considered to be perfect are also fighting the fight to achieve their own idea of perfection.

I’m sure they all rue the day when Twiggy came on the scene and crushed the perfect body picture that Marilyn Monroe painted. I once saw an advertisement from decades ago selling a product that would help women become curvier to look more like Monroe! I, not being exactly a stick-skinny girl, thought that that should be the way it is all the time. After a while though, I thought about all the women who are naturally thinner who probably struggled meeting the standards that Monroe was setting.

How can anyone win? In the end, everyone can learn to be content and assured in the body that God has given her.

Self-esteem issues are obviously not only routed in weight. Women can feel self-conscious about anything from big teeth to webbed toes to stubby fingers (guilty). We can stop being so self-conscious about such things when we realize that these are what make us different. That sounds cliche. But could you imagine a world where every person walking down the street was perfect? That would be boring and frankly, a bit scary.

These “flaws” can be our strengths. When we embrace them, they can make us so much stronger. As we accept ourselves, we can also accept the world for what it is and stop expecting ‘perfection’.

We must stop comparing ourselves to others and hurting ourselves in the process of achieving society’s perception of outward perfection. Many women today see this problem and are in their own fight in getting women to accept their body themselves. In other words, as a prayer of contentment once stated, “I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God’s thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest, and most precious thing in all thinking.”