How My Insecurities Shape My Life

There are several factors that make us who we are, and some experiences and characteristics define us more than others. I have had a strained relationship with my body for several years now. For the majority of my childhood I did not give my body a second thought. I had blonde hair, green eyes, and was always at a healthy height and weight for my age. My mother told me I was beautiful, and the only insecurities I felt were with my personality and intelligence. I was a very shy and quiet kid and my two older sisters bullied me into thinking I was dumb. With age however, those internal insecurities began to come second to my external insecurities. I began seeing people through the lens of society’s expectations. I looked at the bodies of my classmates, my family members, actresses on television, and models in magazines. I no longer cared who was the smartest or the funniest. It seems that I, and the kids around me, began giving the most respect to the conventionally beautiful girls and boys in the class. I began to see how certain characteristics were more desirable. I wanted to have clear skin, straight hair, a flat stomach, and big breasts. I figured in a few years when I finished going through puberty everything I disliked about my body would naturally fix itself. While I did go through periods of feeling at peace with my body, it feels as if I have spent the past decade chasing happiness and confidence by trying to change the way I look.

The first time I remember feeling really insecure about my body was when I had my first boyfriend in 9th grade. It was my first year at a private school where everyone knew each other since kindergarten, so you can imagine how desperate I was to fit in. When I started dating this boy, it felt like I finally had some worth. People talked to me and welcomed me into their friend groups. I sat with him every day at lunch, but I began eating very little, sometimes nothing, because I was embarrassed to eat in front of him. I didn’t want him to think I was gross. He never said anything about my body or my eating habits, but this was still something I felt uncomfortable about. After a few months, he broke up with me so he could date my childhood best friend who went to the public school and I had introduced him to. This was not the first time that a crush of mine chose her over me, and I always felt that it was because she was prettier, shorter, and thinner than I was. We had been best friends since 1st grade, so our mannerisms and senses of humor were almost identical, yet somehow she always got the guy. During the time when they began dating, I began eating less and less.

Margo Demello wrote that our society believes “smaller is better” when it comes to women in general, and I definitely internalized that social norm. Women are supposed to be smaller than men in every way in order to emphasize a man’s masculinity. I stopped wearing heeled boots to school because I wanted to look more petite. I began wearing tighter shirts that emphasized my chest and my newly flat stomach. When she broke up with him and begged to be my friend again, I stopped worrying as much about the way I looked; I was just happy to have my friend back. That summer I went on birth control to help my acne and menstrual cramps, and I started to gain weight and wish that I was thinner again. It was not only comparing myself to my best friend that shaped my ideal image of beauty; media played a large role as well. I actively tried to look at myself as an outsider. Similar to Cooley’s theory of the Looking Glass Self, I began comparing myself to models while assuming that others were doing the same. I felt the pressure from all around me to look a certain way. I watched a lot of television and read magazines made specifically for teenage girls, and everyone looked pretty much the same. They had beautiful faces that looked at least 5 years more mature than mine, yet their bodies looked as if they had never been through puberty. They had tiny waists, no hips, and just the beginnings of breasts coming in.

Actresses in children’s entertainment with larger breasts were always playing the mean girl. Not to mention we were still facing the aftermath of the heroine-chic look of the 1990s. Everyone started talking about thigh gaps, and as my sophomore year went on I could see mine slowly disappearing. I wanted bigger boobs like the women in the shows my mother and sisters watched, but once I got them I felt fat in every shirt I wore. Once again I began to envy the girls that had less going on there. I began making small changes to my body: I tried crash diets, dyed my hair blonder, waxed my eyebrows, wore contacts, wore makeup, and went on birth control, all just to look like someone that I was not and never will be. Possibly even more damaging than the differences I saw between myself and women in media were the similarities. I was raised in a conservative Jewish household. My father is 100% Jewish and both sides of his family are originally from Lithuania. My mother is a Catholic girl with ancestors scattered throughout the United Kingdom. When my parents were married, my paternal grandmother insisted my mother convert to Judaism. I never knew my mother’s parents are we are not close to her siblings, so almost everyone that I consider family is Jewish. I have always considered myself Jewish, yet I look much more like my mother than I do my father. Kids would ask me in elementary school if I still believed in Santa, ready to destroy my innocence, yet I would tell them that I never believed in him to begin with. This happened several times in different ways. Kids would ask what I got for Christmas and I would have to explain to them that I was Jewish. The response was always the same – “I had no idea; you don’t look Jewish”.

Unlike the racially-ambiguous Mexican woman in Latino: How You See Me, I rarely questioned this statement. I understood that I looked more like my Irish ancestors than my Lithuanian ones, and I’m ashamed to say that I may have become a little bit proud of it. We learned in school that people were oppressed and persecuted because of the shape of their nose or the curl of their dark hair, and that Hitler favored those with blonde hair and light eyes. I was proud of my ancestors, but I was actually a bit relieved that I didn’t look like them. Part of me was afraid that history would repeat itself, and that I might be spared if I could look Christian. Even today I am sometimes afraid of how people will react when they find out that I’m Jewish. I believe this is part of what led me to the biggest physical change I have ever made – getting a nose job. As my nose began getting bigger throughout my adolescent years, I began to hate it. I felt like it was a physical mark that gave others permission to judge me. Yet, rarely anyone outside of my immediate family ever made fun of me for it. While my family meant no harm by pointing out my big nose, they didn’t realize that their comments were making me extremely insecure. I have always been able to brush off criticism from people who do not know me very well, but to hear it from the people I was closest to really hurt.

Similarly, my sister was the one who convinced me to start dying my hair blonder once it started to darken at age 14. She also always called herself “fat” and “disgusting”, while being at least 20 pounds lighter than my sister and I. I have often had the thought, “If she is fat and disgusting, what does that make me?”. She still does this today, and it is difficult for me to separate her own insecurity from what she might be really thinking about my body. Over the years she has subconsciously taught me that it is better to look like an all-American, thin, Christian girl than it is to look like our dark-haired, full bodied, Jewish family members. Roxanne Gay wrote that you should be able to acknowledge your privilege while still owning your struggles. That being said, I know that I have had it relatively easy compared to some of my peers. I am straight, white, upper-middle class, fully-abled, and young. Being Jewish and being a female are the only things that really differentiate me from the people that are demonized for being over-privileged. Although it may be easier to be a Christian male in America, being Jewish and female have a lot of advantages to them as well.

Overall I would say that my body allows me to be pretty high up on the scale of privilege. I do not have to fear that people will get the wrong impression of me just because my skin is a certain color. I do not have to worry about being wrongly accused of sexual assault or violent crimes. People tend to assume that I am an innocent, good, and nice person. I’m not saying that I am not those things, but some people have to continually try to prove their good character to others, only to be ignored. While there is still a lot of inequality between the sexes, I believe that there is much more inequality between the races. Although Gay warned us against playing the “Game of Privilege”, I believe I am better off in our society as a white woman than I would be as a black man. Black men have to live with caution in our society because those with more social power and privilege dehumanize them to an extreme extent. However, as a woman I too live in a constant state of fear. I try to never walk alone at night, and my mind is always thinking about what I could use to defend myself in case of an attack. I also feel that I am not taken as seriously as I would if I were a man, and that people assume I do not know what I’m talking about in a serious situation. It also seems like I am much less valuable in society if I am not tied to a man, and that being connected to a man is the only way that I can feel safe from other men.

In general I feel safest with my father, not my mother, and when I go to bars it seems like saying “I have a boyfriend” is the only phrase that makes men walk away. It is scary to think that I will live my entire life with this fear, but I know that this feeling is probably here to stay. My body grants me both physical and social agency. While it is easy for me to look in the mirror and hate what I see, I try to remain thankful for all of the things it has to offer me. I can walk, swim, listen to music, dance, run, etc. because of my body. My body has some abilities that others do not, and it has some shortfalls that others do not. At the end of the day, the functionality of my body is one of my greatest assets, and it is what lets me experience all the highs and lows of life. As a young, white woman, my body also provides me with several social advantages that I may not have had otherwise. I occasionally get things for free like drinks at a bar or a meal at a restaurant. I can playfully hit a man on the arm or stomach without anyone giving it a second thought. I can easily get help with physical tasks like moving into a new apartment or having a door opened for me. However, as previously mentioned, these small, everyday advantages come with big limitations. Since a very young age I have been explicitly and implicitly taught that I cannot do certain things because I am a female. I grew up assuming that instead of a serious career I would just become a housewife. My parents would tell me I could be anything I wanted to be, yet if I faced any adversity they would let me quit and try something new. I was never told to “suck it up” or that one day I would have to “provide for my family”. I was allowed to live a frivolous life until I would eventually get married and take care of my husband’s children. While I know that those are not concrete limitations, it is always something that is in the back of my mind. When a new opportunity arises, it is often my first instinct to believe I wouldn’t be good enough or smart enough to do it on my own, even though I cannot recall a time that I actually tried and failed to get something done.

I am constantly trying to determine what my actual desires and anxieties are versus what is simply internalized misogyny. However, it is discussions like these that help me realize where my insecurities stem from, and they help me learn how I can improve upon them in the future.