How to Talk to Little Girls from Miskabelly

Flickr image by Krista Kruger

Hoping you'll check out this post on one of my fave blogs and let us/them know your thoughts on the subject. Whether you have kids of your own or not, I'm sure each of you knows at least one little girl. :) I left my thoughts in a (long, of course - I don't know any other way to be!!) comment on their blog.

How to Talk To Little Girls

There has been a lot of buzz on the interwebs this week surrounding this Huff Post article about the way we interact with young girls, which makes an extremely valuable point:

"Teaching girls that their appearance is the first thing you notice tells them that looks are more important than anything. It sets them up for dieting at age 5 and foundation at age 11 and boob jobs at 17 and Botox at 23. As our cultural imperative for girls to be hot 24/7 has become the new normal, American women have become increasingly unhappy. What's missing? A life of meaning, a life of ideas and reading books and being valued for our thoughts and accomplishments."

You can find Miskabelly's post here. And I will say I think Amanda's position on the subject is much healthier and balanced than the article writer's seemingly all-or-nothing approach, though I completely get where she’s coming from.

http://miskabellyvintage.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-talk-to-little-girls.html

P.S. HAPPY FRIDAAAAAAAAYYYYY!!! And a happy and safe 4^th for those of y’all in the States.

- Jenarcissist

Bathroom Stall Inspiration in Atlanta

Recapturing the self-love you were born with.

Kam and I had a discussion by text last night that really got me thinking about things I want my husband and me to tell our daughter when she comes along and is old enough to understand. Well, actually, it's something I think about all the time, but it prompted a good discussion with my husband. Kam said that her 11-year-old daughter has been saying recently that she thinks she is pretty, and it really warms my heart to hear that, and we all hope she maintains a sense of self-love, especially as she's entering probably the most difficult age. 

As my husband and I talked, we decided that instead of telling our daughter she is perfect (as it would be so tempting to do), we will tell her she is ENOUGH and that she does not have to be perfect. I want her to feel wonderful just the way she is, without the pressure I felt growing up to constantly measure up to my own self-imposed and misguided standards for perfection. When I stopped feeling like I had to be perfect, that was when my real life started. Maybe telling a child that he or she is "perfect" could leave them with the subconscious feeling that they have something to continually live up to, like they can never be allowed to mess up. I'm sure some of it depends on the child too. Or maybe a "you're perfect to me" (like that awesome Pink song, which I promise the baby started kicking to the other day!) or "you're perfect the way you are without needing to do anything to earn my approval" would work too.

One of our handmade necklaces, available on our web site or etsy shop.

Our BFF Bon sent me an email today from a great web site called Heal Your Life, which contained probably one of the best things I've ever read. It's along these same lines but applies to all you self-love-seeking grownups, and I wanted to share it with you too.

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL! How to Let Your Love Shine

by Crystal Andrus

I REMEMBER A RETREAT I was having not too long ago when Natalie Hughes (our musical director) couldn’t find a babysitter for her small daughter, Audrey. Natalie always performs during these special days and it’s just not the same without her. She asked if she could bring Audrey and let my teenage daughters watch her.

“Of course!” was our answer.

Just before the day got started, I asked Audrey if I could introduce her to the group of ladies—many who looked a little anxious. Audrey happily agreed.

Up Audrey came, a little shy but glowing; I asked her to tell everyone her name and how old she was. I then asked her if she was beautiful. “Yes,” she nodded with the sweetest smile. She certainly was beautiful! She then told us that she was also “smart and talented and very loveable.”

The ladies all admired her gentle strength and humble confidence. We admired her God-given sense of self-love.

Audrey hadn’t learned to hate herself . . . yet. Audrey hadn’t learned that her hips were too big or her breasts too small. She hadn’t decided that men would probably hurt her or that money didn’t grow on trees.

Audrey was still trusting, believing, and completely hopeful about life and the important part she would play in it. Audrey loved herself. Not with selfish narcissism but with a natural sense of divinity.

We are born with self-love. We didn’t have to learn it. We innately felt it. We instinctively believed in our parents. We trusted that they would protect, guide, encourage, and empower us, until we were old enough to make our way out into the world with confidence, courage, and certainty.

But for many of us, this didn’t happen.

Our parents didn’t give us what we needed. It’s not necessarily their fault, though. They probably didn’t get the messages of self-love delivered to them either!

My parents never once told me as a child that they loved me. Not once. I didn’t find out until I was a teenager that my mother’s parents had never spoken those words to her either!

Parents don’t intentionally set out to ruin their children. I’m a mother myself; I can’t imagine carrying the burden of thinking I said or did anything that may have negatively affected my daughter’s self esteem, self worth and self love! But I probably have . . . not even knowing it.

Parents carry their own wounds, shame, pain, and blame. And they unconsciously project it all over their kids. The truth is we all project our light and our darkness on those around us—unless we’ve done some serious self-work!

Marianne Williamson points out in her extraordinary book, A Course in Weight Loss, that “the love you’ve withheld from yourself … is held in trust for you until you’re ready to receive it.” This concept is so huge!

You probably have an enormous warehouse of self-love stored up inside of you!

Do you understand that the only reason you’re struggling so much is because you’ve been too afraid to shine bright. You’ve been worried that being YOU—magnificent, beautiful, talented, sexy, powerful, amazing—will hurt you. You’ve tucked your self-love, along with your bright shining light, deep deep inside.

You may have insulated your self-love so far down that you think it’s lost, but it isn’t! Your love can never leave you—even if you’ve left it! 

This week, your job is to remember who you were as a child. Find a picture of yourself. Notice all the wonderful qualities you possessed, the wonder and trust in your eyes. (You may even have to go all the way back to a picture of yourself as a baby.)

Write down ten positive affirmations about “her.” An example of your list may be:

You are so beautiful.

You are so kind.

You are so smart.

You are so special.

You are so sweet.

You are so loveable.

You are so important to me.

Your life matters.

You matter.

I love you!

Then, every morning and evening, look into the mirror—into your own eyes—and repeat these affirmations to yourself.

This is the start . . . the beginning of falling back in love with you! It may feel futile at first. Do it anyway.

***********

And one more thing to leave you with - something else I came across this week. Here's a partial.

50 Reasons You are Beautiful

1.     It is beautiful to speak another language. It is beautiful to try.

2.    Beauty is long hair, and short hair; brown, black, pink, yellow, or white. Beauty is a smooth bald head.

3.    If you have been to hell and back, your resilience is beautiful.

4.    Asking questions—especially “why?”—is always beautiful. Why? Because curiosity is beautiful.

5.    You are beautiful when you are afraid to do something, and you do it anyway.

Click here to read the rest of the list - I promise it won't be a waste of time!

So what we wanna know is...what are some of your ideas for recapturing the childlike essence of self-love we hopefully had before the world or other people (or ourselves) "beat" it out of us? How do you plan to get it back?

Body Confessions: Think skinny girls have no image issues?

flickr photo credit Janelle Rodriguez

I came across a web site today, www.bodyconfessions.com, while reading on Medicinal Marzipan. It's a place where you can anonymously confess how you feel about your body. The idea intrigued me, so I clicked over to see what people were saying. 

Let me warn you that you should read through this web site with a certain amount of caution. I read through 17 pages of it and felt like I needed a good cry to purge it out of my system. So much sadness, so much self-hatred. It was a little overwhelming. I can remember reading maybe 3 posts where people were confessing things they actually LOVE about themselves. As I said in my comment on MM's post, "I absolutely appreciate their vulnerability and honesty, but I’m with you on changing the convo. I’m sure it helps a lot of gals to know others out there are struggling with the same things, but they also need to hear from more of us who’ve been there and overcame it! Then maybe they’ll believe they can do it too." So if you decide to click over, pleeeeease do yourself and many others a favor by posting something you like or love about your body, even if you have to start small with toes like one poster did. 

A few confessions really stuck out to me, and I found myself a little surprised by them. We tend to think that anyone who's skinnier than we are (no matter what our weight, cuz there's always someone out there who's skinnier) must automatically have an awesome self-image, right? But not necessarily. We think, "Oh, if only I looked like SO-AND-SO, I'd never feel bad about myself!" Well, truth be told, yes, you probably would. Because how you perceive yourself is based so much more in your mind than how you actually look. I'm at a healthy-for-me weight now, but losing weight didn't automatically solve my body image issues. And just because I co-run a blog about confidence doesn't mean I feel confident 100% of the time...just a whole lot more than I used to. :)

I tweeted a while back that Forever 21's current models are so thin that they're painful to look at, and I'm sorry, but I still stand by that. They look sickly, and those ads are probably making even skinny girls feel overweight. I hope to God the ads are airbrushed just so those girls aren't being pressured to actually be that thin; I just have a hard time believing anyone is that thin without hurting themselves. People love ads that promote women "who aren't sticks," as people like to say, and we think those types of ads automatically promote self-confidence for the "real woman." I'm not saying those ads are bad at all. They're a much better alternative than Forever 21's. But maybe we forget how skinnier-than-us women sometimes feel. (Again, I say skinnier-than-us because skinny can be a relative term.) Before you roll your eyes, read these confessions.

I'm petite, 5'1" tall, 106 pounds, and I don't really like my body. It hurts so much when people say something about my A cups, because I would do anything for them to grow bigger. I'm afraid of getting close with guys because I think they won't like my body and I cringe every time I see an ad saying how skinny people "aren't real women". I wish I could love my body.

I'm little, all around, but I'm in average weight for my height (5')-- not overweight, not skinny, right where I should be. I once tried on a size 2 skirt that was too big, and asked the saleswoman for a 0. She got it for me, but scoffed, "I wish I was a size 0. But I actually eat." She was about half a foot taller than me. I was so offended. I eat. I love food. I don't purge. It isn't my fault that vanity sizing has screwed everything up and that there's no consistency in sizes between stores, either. Maybe it isn't nice to be the "fat friend", but it isn't nice when people make rude comments about the size you wear when that has nothing to do with how skinny or healthy you are.

When I feel confident and I can walk down a beach in a bikini and feel good about my body, I feel that other women are suspicious of me, or jealous, or just spiteful. But when I'm self-conscious and uncomfortable in my own skin, I feel that other women are dismissive and annoyed. I'm short and I'm slender, but that's not the point. I really hate all this body-bashing that goes on, and I'm sick and tired of my friends who are bigger than me (most of them,) comparing their thighs to mine, or saying things like, "You're so skinny, I hate you." I know they're joking, but it makes me really uncomfortable. Even if they're not overweight, there's nothing I can say that would make them feel better. My best friend is overweight. I don't care, I think she's beautiful, and I love her for her personality, not her dress size. But I can't express the least bit of self-consciousness without her yelling at me and really making me feel humiliated. I'm angry that such a stupid thing, like weight and body shape, has had such a negative impact on so many of my relationships.

I was always the fat girl. The girl looking she is about to die on the treadmill at the gym and giving the evil-eye to all the skinny b words. I finally lost all of it. Now the heavy girls give me the evil-eye. I still feel fat.

When women who are skinnier than me complain about their fat and say self-deprecating things like "OMG, I am such a fat cow", I want to slap them. If you think that you're a fat cow, what do you think of me?

There is just as much prejudice against thin girls as there is against larger girls. Other women judge you, hate you, despise you--without ever speaking to you. People are offended when you say you need to get more exercise or need to eat healthier foods because you have a smaller body. Healthy is healthy regardless of size, and wanting to eat right and exercise is NOT the same as wanting to lose weight. Stop looking down on me for weighing under 150 pounds.

Thanks to the cultural positioning of thinness as extremely desirable, I feel really awkward about describing myself as thin, skinny, slender, etc. Using those words feels like bragging or gloating. Nobody has a problem with me saying "I have brown hair", but I can't say "I am thin" without worrying that people will think I'm conceited or full of myself.

Kam's probably a good 20 pounds lighter than I am, though, oddly, we can share some of the same clothes, and I've never figured out how that is. But she looks great, I look great, thank ya very much. ;) I know I've said to her on more than one occasion, when she makes some sort of comment about the love handles she thinks she has, "Will you quit already? You're skinny. Shut up." We tend to think that saying something like that will boost the confidence of the other girl. Maybe it doesn't always. We're not always fishing for compliments when we make bad comments about ourselves to our friends; sometimes we're genuinely self-conscious and looking for support.

Picture on bodyconfessions.com. What was your first thought when you looked at it?

"I'm so glad I don't look like her (A or B)!"

"A needs to eat a sandwich!" or "I hate A for being thinner than I am!"

"B needs to stop being so lazy!"

It's easy to make snap judgments. It doesn't make them accurate or okay!!

My real point here (I think) is that real beauty isn't defined one way. We think we know that, but when we start looking down on skinnier-than-us women or bigger-than-us women as a source of so-called empowerment ("At least I don't look like her!"), maybe it makes us feel better about our own bodies for a little while, but it's not really helping solve the overall problem. Some "real women" are naturally skinny no matter what they do, and some are larger framed. I think we gotta start learning to appreciate bodies of ALL shapes and sizes and focus on health...without getting wrapped up in who we'd rather look like and without looking down on someone just because they're bigger or smaller than we are. Does being skinnier or heavier always equate to health or non-health, respectively? They can, but not always! You can just as easily be skinny and unhealthy and larger and healthy. Stop judging the smaller girls just because you're bigger, and stop judging the bigger girls just because you're smaller. Okay? Good. Glad we got that settled. :)

Large and small alike, we all gots goods that are worth showin' off! I read more than one confession from women who were so ashamed of their bodies that they had not let their husbands see them naked in years. Oh, how that saddens me!!! For them and for their hubbies. That's doing way more harm to their relationships than their husbands seeing "JUST HOW FAT" they think they really are.

http://www.etsy.com/listing/65326992/more-than-one-way-to-be-beautiful

If you have more curves, if you have less curves, embrace your body for what it is, without the "aid" of looking down your nose at someone who's a different size from you. It's yours, it's beautiful, it's powerful, it can do so many things. You've gotta learn to see it realistically for what it really is - not what you think you see and not who you think you should look like. Treat it right, be healthy, and it will reward you. 

And sorry to close out like Jerry Springer, but...we need to take care of ourselves and each other. Women of all shapes and sizes typically have some sort of body image issue. We need to stop being so mean and judgmental of each other, even when it's only on the inside! And that absolutely includes the ways we judge ourselves.

I was a confidence MACHINE this weekend!! ;)

What are some little ways you increase your confidence, even if only temporarily?

These two hats are my mom-in-law's latest creations for my other etsy shop, juniper + clover. I put them on just to take pics for our listings, and WHOA!! Instant confidence! Then I added in the fake glasses, and even more so! (I do sometimes wear my real glasses, but these are faux. The lenses on my faux pairs aren't very clear, so they bug me after a while, but they sure are cute.) I couldn't believe how my mood and perception of myself were instantly transformed just by donning hats! I wanted to head on over into our town square, which is filled with really awesome and funky people who dress way cool and maybe, just maybe, intimidate me a little sometimes unknowingly, and strut down the street with the best of 'em!!! I'm definitely gonna need one of these for myself as a keeper. This is one reason we say 'round here that we celebrate inner and outer beauty. Of course we know which one is the more important one, duh, but when you try to improve upon your outer beauty (within reason), sometimes it will enhance how you feel about yourself, thereby making you feel freer to showcase your inner beauty as well.

When I had funky, bright hair colors, it was like an automatic bravery boost as well! You cannot have bright pink or purple hair and not enjoy the extra looks you get walking down the street. ;) 

No She Didn't pictured

Wearing Lime Crime lipsticks, especially the ones that are not traditional colors (which, thankfully, is most of them!) has the same effect on me. I sometimes hear people say, "It looks great on other people, but I could never wear that color." Somehow, that never crossed my mind. When she first came out with the line, I was so entranced by them that I was determined to have them and ROCK them! And I think I do, not so much because of how I look but the ATTITUDE I have when wearing them...especially this blue one called No She Didn't. Man, I put that on and feel like I can conquer the world!

The candle was a gift from my friend Shybiker. :) Isn't it cute??

I got three free nailpolishes in the mail this weekend from Zoya - they were doing a special where you could get three if you just paid S+H. I got three of the brightest, boldest ones they had to offer!! One of them is called Yummy, this gorgeous, matte sky blue that I think is gonna look great with my No She Didn't. (Plan to do a review on the nailpolishes soon, but I think I can safely say I love 'em so far.)


I really don't wanna make y'all tired of hearing about our bottlecap necklaces, but I truly do just LOVE them even if no one were ever to buy one...I take joy every morning in picking one out to wear, and it may be a reflection of how I'm already feeling that day, or it may be something that prods me to feel how I WANT to feel.

(The rest of my hair is still long; it's in a ponytail here.)

And, finally, I got my bangs yesterday! I have unfortunately not managed to get a good picture of myself with them yet, but as you can see, they don't really look that different from any bangs I've had before...yet they were just what I needed to start propelling me out of the winter blahs! I've had the same stylist for, oh, about 8 years, I think...fate led me to a Hair Cuttery of all places, and it didn't take long for me to realize this girl belonged in her own place. We developed a friendship over the years, and I kept encouraging her to get past her fears and get her own space...and she finally did! I'm so proud of her. She also did my wedding hair, and I PROMISE someday soon I will tell you guys all about our wedding and show pictures! Anyway, when I walked out of her salon, I felt like a million bucks. I walked down the street like I owned it, with a smile on my face. I saw two guys do double-takes out of the corner of my eye. When I met up with my husband where he was waiting for me and then found a mirror, I realized the wind had swept my bangs into chaos, nothing like the perfect way she'd fixed them, and I looked pretty frazzled, actually...and yet they were still looking because I was CONFIDENT. I'm not purposely trying to get other guys to look at me; I'm just making a point. ;)


Getting my nose pierced and my two tattoos, as well as being part of the closet narcissist, naturally boosted my confidence as well. Blogging in here actually boosts me up a little more every time, simply because I'm talking about confidence. You'll naturally soak up whatever you focus on.


None of these things can provide real, lasting confidence in and of themselves until you internalize the confidence and ingrain it into your heart. But they're small steps that help you "fake it til you make it," until it becomes so ingrained in you that you don't "NEED" the funky hair color or certain hat but just WANT them simply because they make you feel even better. Now and then, we all need a little extra boost! And, you know what, sometimes the only thing you need to boost your mood or your confidence is to plaster a big smile on your face even when it's the last thing you feel like doing. It just might work.

On an unrelated note...is it a sign that I'm 30 years old if I am somewhat intrigued by Pajama Jeans?? They don't look bad to me! Am I about to get lost in a world of elastic waistbands that I don't have to unbutton after a large meal? heehee Hmm...not sure if these would boost my confidence or not! ;)


Oh, and I have stayed up all friggin' night long redoing the entire blog layout, from the header to the template to each little facet I'm able to change...I'm happy with it, and I certainly hope y'all are, cuz I'm gonna be paying for this...grooaaannnn.


But back to the original point of this post (sorry, I am getting loopy!):


What are the little things that help boost confidence for you??