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Old 04-28-2012, 10:41 AM
 
Location: Elsewhere
88,293 posts, read 84,292,537 times
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I just thought this might make an interesting thread.

How do the rest of you on this forum feel your physical looks have played a part--if any--in influencing your mental state?

This came to the forefront of my mind this weekend because I attended a fashion show this week at my daughter's college. Now I am a woman who has never been considered attractive--this is merely a fact, not a pity party or attention-gathering statement. When I was in sixth grade, a boy nominated me for ugliest girl in the class, and everyone apparently agreed. Over the years, of course, I learned to make myself as presentable as possible with the use of makeup, hair, etc., so it's not as though I walk around with a bag over my head or anything, but I am not a pretty woman and I never can be. It's a physical impossibility. But presentable, yes. Growing up and as a young adult, though, it was always the first and foremost thing on my mind--what did people think when they first saw me, and what could I do to overcome the inevitable negative impression? Sometimes I played it by having a sense of humor. If you make people laugh, they are more likely to forgive your homeliness.

However, through some weird chance of genetics (and of course the half contributed by her father), I have a physically beautiful daughter. Since she was a child, I've heard, sometimes accompanied by a small gasp, "That's YOUR daughter?" She was a model in the fashion show I attended, and so I got to hear a version of this again this week, "YOU'RE <Name's> mother?"

In some ways it's made me wistful, because my daughter, just by virtue of her natural beauty, has had doors open for her that never opened for me. She has always had a boyfriend and others who wished they were her boyfriend. People want to be near her, adults in her life, like teachers, have always chosen her for special attention, etc. Her life so far has been completely different than mine was at that age just by virtue of the fact that she is pretty and I was not.

However, I've also learned by being her mother that beauty doesn't always mean complete confidence and lack of issues. She has inherited from the anxiety and obsessive thinking that needs to be treated by a professional. She's had a boyfriend who thought of her as a possession and tried to control her. She's also a young woman of above-average intelligence who wants to have deeper discussions about life and literature than some of her peers are interested in.

So beauty--whether you have it or not--can have an effect on your mental and emotional state. And it can also change over time. For a great deal of my younger years, just walking down the street knowing I was homely brought on a feeling of shame. I wanted to hide from the world, to not allow anyone the chance to mock me or talk about me behind my back. However, now in my fifties, when women are thought to be "invisible" anyway, I sort of enjoy the anonymity of my "nothing" looks and the fact that I can go to the beach or a public place and know that no one's looking at me and that it doesn't matter. I do get second looks sometimes because of my height, but there isn't much I can do about that one.

Anyone else have any thoughts or personal stories on the subject?
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Old 04-28-2012, 11:07 AM
 
Location: Love, Epicenter
399 posts, read 580,796 times
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*nods* feeling ugly can definitely affect one's mental state. I remember when i was 7, some of the other kids use to tease me because I use to have mosquito bites all over my skin and one of my friends use to hate holding my hand and would call me "Toad" because i was bumpy. I also use to like this one guy who use to treat me with such cruelty. He'd tease and call me stupid and ugly and "buck" at me whenever I looked in his direction. But he'd flirt with my friend. My gramps also started subjecting me to color discrimination in that I had to serve my cousin food who was lighter skin before I could eat and stuff. I told myself that maybe it was because I was older, but I had another cousin who was younger than me, but because she was darker, he'd do the same thing.

Then when i got to middle school a lot of the boys had this color thing going on and so I always felt like I wasn't good enough. I use to be compared to the lighter skinned girls and the boys use to treat them nicer and I would see the boys call the other dark skin girls, "Ugly black *****", "Dark as ****" and all these other horrible names and so it wasn't hard for me to see and know that I wasn't considered the standard and I took that to heart and would always try to figure out what was wrong with me physically because I felt that I was beautiful on the inside, just that no one seemed to see it. I got more introspective during that time to as I was just doing a lot of soul searching.

The funny thing was, was that by the time I turned 13, a lot of people at my mom's work and at the hair salon and at places I'd go to would randomly comment to my mom, "You're daughter's so BEAUTIFUL!" and it reached a point where I was recruited to enter into the Miss Teen pageant for my state. Even then i still felt I wasn't good enough because I carried those scars with me. I just felt ugly. I was about 5 pts away from making it into the top 5 in the pageant and when I lost I was happy I did something like that, but so ashamed that I lost and thought others would ridicule me. Instead they didn't.

High school freshman year things seemed to get better. I can't remember what changed exactly because it was gradual and I know that by the time I was 15/16, things seemed to change. I had friends I liked hanging out with, I felt better about myself and just more...self-assured I guess is the word...or vain. I think it could be both because I took a lot of pictures of myself all the time in a bunch of different poses because I started falling in love with my skin color more and more but loved that I was so intuitive. I don't remember the specifics, but it wasn't because of the pageant. I was never a popular girl or even really well-known (I think), but I started getting a lot of comments about my body, and legs, and my intellect, my "nature" but I never wore make-up. To this day, still don't. And even though i was somewhat vain about my complexion and body, I use to focus more on developing the self because I started seeing how unimportant and subjective looks really were. I guess at some point it just clicked that what I did and how I treated others, not how I looked made an attractive creature.

I'm streaming consciousness here. I wanted to contribute to your post but I'm having a hard time really recalling the specifics of this long journey. Hope I stayed on track. lol

Last edited by soliloquyenlightened; 04-28-2012 at 11:10 AM.. Reason: Typos....I'm good at typos. lol
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Old 04-28-2012, 11:38 AM
 
Location: Elsewhere
88,293 posts, read 84,292,537 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PrinieRN View Post
*nods* feeling ugly can definitely affect one's mental state. I remember when i was 7, some of the other kids use to tease me because I use to have mosquito bites all over my skin and one of my friends use to hate holding my hand and would call me "Toad" because i was bumpy. I also use to like this one guy who use to treat me with such cruelty. He'd tease and call me stupid and ugly and "buck" at me whenever I looked in his direction. But he'd flirt with my friend. My gramps also started subjecting me to color discrimination in that I had to serve my cousin food who was lighter skin before I could eat and stuff. I told myself that maybe it was because I was older, but I had another cousin who was younger than me, but because she was darker, he'd do the same thing.

Then when i got to middle school a lot of the boys had this color thing going on and so I always felt like I wasn't good enough. I use to be compared to the lighter skinned girls and the boys use to treat them nicer and I would see the boys call the other dark skin girls, "Ugly black *****", "Dark as ****" and all these other horrible names and so it wasn't hard for me to see and know that I wasn't considered the standard and I took that to heart and would always try to figure out what was wrong with me physically because I felt that I was beautiful on the inside, just that no one seemed to see it. I got more introspective during that time to as I was just doing a lot of soul searching.

The funny thing was, was that by the time I turned 13, a lot of people at my mom's work and at the hair salon and at places I'd go to would randomly comment to my mom, "You're daughter's so BEAUTIFUL!" and it reached a point where I was recruited to enter into the Miss Teen pageant for my state. Even then i still felt I wasn't good enough because I carried those scars with me. I just felt ugly. I was about 5 pts away from making it into the top 5 in the pageant and when I lost I was happy I did something like that, but so ashamed that I lost and thought others would ridicule me. Instead they didn't.

High school freshman year things seemed to get better. I can't remember what changed exactly because it was gradual and I know that by the time I was 15/16, things seemed to change. I had friends I liked hanging out with, I felt better about myself and just more...self-assured I guess is the word...or vain. I think it could be both because I took a lot of pictures of myself all the time in a bunch of different poses because I started falling in love with my skin color more and more but loved that I was so intuitive. I don't remember the specifics, but it wasn't because of the pageant. I was never a popular girl or even really well-known (I think), but I started getting a lot of comments about my body, and legs, and my intellect, my "nature" but I never wore make-up. To this day, still don't. And even though i was somewhat vain about my complexion and body, I use to focus more on developing the self because I started seeing how unimportant and subjective looks really were. I guess at some point it just clicked that what I did and how I treated others, not how I looked made an attractive creature.

I'm streaming consciousness here. I wanted to contribute to your post but I'm having a hard time really recalling the specifics of this long journey. Hope I stayed on track. lol
No, it was really interesting!!! LOL, my own post was a sort of stream-of-consciousness thing. I returned from my daughter's college last night with these weird mixed emotions--I guess comparing myself at 20 to these kids and it dredged up some old feelings.

And what I bolded is very important. Well said.

I am white, but I've always been interested in certain aspects of black culture (and black history) and some years ago I read Lawrence Graham's book "Our Kind of People", about the wealthier and usually light-skinned segment of America's African-American population. Graham himself was a little darker than his cousins, and he recalls how his grandmother used to yell at him and his brother to come in out of the sun because "Lord knows you're dark enough already."

It's a subculture that most white Americans don't even know exists, and I found it fascinating. To most whites, black people are black no matter what shade their skin is, and it was a surprise to how much lighter or darker skin plays a part in the perception of what is beauty in the African-American culture.
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Old 04-28-2012, 11:55 AM
 
Location: Love, Epicenter
399 posts, read 580,796 times
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Originally Posted by Mightyqueen801 View Post
No, it was really interesting!!! LOL, my own post was a sort of stream-of-consciousness thing. I returned from my daughter's college last night with these weird mixed emotions--I guess comparing myself at 20 to these kids and it dredged up some old feelings.

And what I bolded is very important. Well said.

I am white, but I've always been interested in certain aspects of black culture (and black history) and some years ago I read Lawrence Graham's book "Our Kind of People", about the wealthier and usually light-skinned segment of America's African-American population. Graham himself was a little darker than his cousins, and he recalls how his grandmother used to yell at him and his brother to come in out of the sun because "Lord knows you're dark enough already."

It's a subculture that most white Americans don't even know exists, and I found it fascinating. To most whites, black people are black no matter what shade their skin is, and it was a surprise to how much lighter or darker skin plays a part in the perception of what is beauty in the African-American culture.
It's a deep seated system that I've never been able to put in a box and say, "This is what it is". But I've read stories and with my experiences it seems to happen across races too. Flip side is that I was liberated from a lot of other things like media images and buying into the marketing hype because most of the products they advertised on t.v and the women I saw on television and in ads, never really connected with me so in that sense I had the freedom to develop my own side.

But I'm sorry if I'm all over the place. I'm exhausted and it takes a lot of work for me to do memory recall so I can share my story.

I hope you don't mind me saying, since you have a daughter, you were able to find someone who was willing to come together with you to create someone as beautiful as her. I believe someone saw something in you they were drawn to. I know we compare at times. For me I sometimes compare my nature with others. I'm pretty laid-back and I can look at my work and say, "It's good enough" (even though I hold myself to really high standards) and most of the people in my school are kind of "Type A" and very competitive so it can make me feel like I'm not proactive and that I'm lazy. In those moments, I know I need to take a break to re-centralize and refocus.
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Old 04-28-2012, 12:22 PM
 
Location: Elsewhere
88,293 posts, read 84,292,537 times
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Originally Posted by PrinieRN View Post
It's a deep seated system that I've never been able to put in a box and say, "This is what it is". But I've read stories and with my experiences it seems to happen across races too. Flip side is that I was liberated from a lot of other things like media images and buying into the marketing hype because most of the products they advertised on t.v and the women I saw on television and in ads, never really connected with me so in that sense I had the freedom to develop my own side.

But I'm sorry if I'm all over the place. I'm exhausted and it takes a lot of work for me to do memory recall so I can share my story.

I hope you don't mind me saying, since you have a daughter, you were able to find someone who was willing to come together with you to create someone as beautiful as her. I believe someone saw something in you they were drawn to. I know we compare at times. For me I sometimes compare my nature with others. I'm pretty laid-back and I can look at my work and say, "It's good enough" (even though I hold myself to really high standards) and most of the people in my school are kind of "Type A" and very competitive so it can make me feel like I'm not proactive and that I'm lazy. In those moments, I know I need to take a break to re-centralize and refocus.
Standards of beauty do happen across all races and within races. It must be some weird human form of categorization within us.

As for your comment about me "finding someone", no I don't mind, but I've written about my marriage in other places on here. Short version, I was married to a nice-looking but alcoholic person who I believe now with the 20-20 vision of hindsight latched on to me because I was the classic "caretaker" type and he needed someone to take on his responsibilities and pay his way so that he could continue on with his alcoholic life. Probably not on a conscious level but on some level he saw that I was ripe for the picking. I don't think that people really understand that just as many unattractive women yearn for love and marriage and children as do the pretty ones. And sometimes those desires can make us easy marks.

I still struggle at times with the shame of having been so easily fooled.
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Old 04-28-2012, 02:54 PM
 
Location: Southwest Desert
4,166 posts, read 6,299,579 times
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Mightyqueen...Thanks for starting this thread and for being so open. (And thanks for encouraging the rest of us to be open too.)...I was a shy, chubby "wallflower" as a kid. Some of my classmates called me names for being overweight. And I was lousy in sports and didn't have many friends...I started "willing" my life to be "better" when I got older. Every night before I went to sleep I visualized being a "beauty queen" later in life. (I started doing this when I was about 6 or 7 or so.)..But I took steps to become more outgoing on my own. And I started eating less and slimmed-down etc...My Dad played ball with me after school and this helped me gain more skills and confidence when it came to sports etc...I became a "CA surfer girl" as a teen and had long blonde hair and really knew how to play the "role."...Anyway I guess you could say that I made my "dreams come true" and did become better looking! (And popular with guys.)...But at some point my life just seemed too shallow and too superficial! And I decided to go the "other way" in my late 20's or so...I enjoyed being a "scholar" and a "student of life" most of all. My "looks" didn't matter anymore and I just focused on developing myself on the "inside."..And I'm still this way today. I don't wear make-up and I don't "color" my grey hair. (Still have a teeny bit of brown "left" mixed with the grey.)...I don't want to have to worry about getting attention from men when I go out. I just want to "blend-in" and be anonymous and go my own way...I don't wrap my identity around the way I "look." It's all about who I am on my "inside." (At least for me anyway.)
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Old 04-28-2012, 03:20 PM
 
Location: Elsewhere
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Originally Posted by CArizona View Post
Mightyqueen...Thanks for starting this thread and for being so open. (And thanks for encouraging the rest of us to be open too.)...I was a shy, chubby "wallflower" as a kid. Some of my classmates called me names for being overweight. And I was lousy in sports and didn't have many friends...I started "willing" my life to be "better" when I got older. Every night before I went to sleep I visualized being a "beauty queen" later in life. (I started doing this when I was about 6 or 7 or so.)..But I took steps to become more outgoing on my own. And I started eating less and slimmed-down etc...My Dad played ball with me after school and this helped me gain more skills and confidence when it came to sports etc...I became a "CA surfer girl" as a teen and had long blonde hair and really knew how to play the "role."...Anyway I guess you could say that I made my "dreams come true" and did become better looking! (And popular with guys.)...But at some point my life just seemed too shallow and too superficial! And I decided to go the "other way" in my late 20's or so...I enjoyed being a "scholar" and a "student of life" most of all. My "looks" didn't matter anymore and I just focused on developing myself on the "inside."..And I'm still this way today. I don't wear make-up and I don't "color" my grey hair. (Still have a teeny bit of brown "left" mixed with the grey.)...I don't want to have to worry about getting attention from men when I go out. I just want to "blend-in" and be anonymous and go my own way...I don't wrap my identity around the way I "look." It's all about who I am on my "inside." (At least for me anyway.)
That is great that you were able to accomplish the remaking of yourself, so to speak, at such a young age and then again in adulthood.

I find it to be a good thing at this age when we there isn't so much emphasis on our looks anymore. I do dye my hair--I started going gray in my 20's--and as mentioned earlier it takes more work to make oneself look presentable when the natural attractiveness isn't there...you tend to improve and fix whatever you can, and the hair color fell into that category. I'm not ready yet to go all gray, but one of these days I might!
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Old 04-28-2012, 04:30 PM
 
Location: Southwest Desert
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Mightyqueen...Thanks for responding. Well I made a vow not to become a typical "senior citizen" when I got older...I always admired older women who kept their hair long and felt okay about "going grey" etc...I'm not really in the "thick" of society right now. I don't have to "punch" a "time clock" everyday etc. I'm sorry you have to travel so far back and forth to work during the week...Even though I don't work at an "outside job" anymore I still like to "hibernate" in my "cave" a lot...My poor Mom! I was her only child and I didn't look like her at all! I took after my Dad...My Mom could care less about how she looked most of the time. (Guess she didn't wrap her identity around her looks either.) But when she got dressed-up to go to church or someplace else she had a "striking presence." Most of the time she wore black. She loved black!...My Mom was always a little on the heavy-side due to lifelong thyroid problems...I went off the "deep-end" for a little while and played "beauty queen." But then I came back around to being more like my Mom...I'm attracted to people based on their personalities and the special "spark of life" inside of them!..When I went through the period of making my "looks" all and everything I attracted shallow and superifical men! No wonder my earlier relationships didn't work-out very well. They were based on a false and make-believe "value-system!"
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Old 04-28-2012, 04:36 PM
 
Location: Elsewhere
88,293 posts, read 84,292,537 times
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Originally Posted by CArizona View Post
Mightyqueen...Thanks for responding. Well I made a vow not to become a typical "senior citizen" when I got older...I always admired older women who kept their hair long and felt okay about "going grey" etc...I'm not really in the "thick" of society right now. I don't have to "punch" a "time clock" everyday etc. I'm sorry you have to travel so far back and forth to work during the week...Even though I don't work at an "outside job" anymore I still like to "hibernate" in my "cave" a lot...My poor Mom! I was her only child and I didn't look like her at all! I took after my Dad...My Mom could care less about how she looked most of the time. (Guess she didn't wrap her identity around her looks either.) But when she got dressed-up to go to church or someplace else she had a "striking presence." Most of the time she wore black. She loved black!...My Mom was always a little on the heavy-side due to lifelong thyroid problems...I went off the "deep-end" for a little while and played "beauty queen." But then I came back around to being more like my Mom...I'm attracted to people based on their personalities and the special "spark of life" inside of them!..When I went through the period of making my "looks" all and everything I attracted shallow and superifical men! No wonder my earlier relationships didn't work-out very well. They were based on a false and make-believe "value-system!"
Ah, the long commute is because I've been working in NYC all of my life. It was exciting when I was 20...not so much at 53, but we actually moved to Jersey City this past year, so it cut some time off the commute (JC is across the river from NYC--I look at the new WTC going up every day now!) But obviously I cannot leave or change jobs now--too much time in the pension system, so I have to wait until I hit the earliest age at which I can retire and then decide whether to stay or see if I can find another job closer to home. Not too far off.

Anyway, I probably will continue to color my hair for a while, at least while I'm working. When and if I finally get to retire, I will likely just let it go, just as I will never wear suits again and will spend my days in comfy clothing.
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Old 04-28-2012, 05:31 PM
 
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For most of my life, I have worked with blind people. And have come to realized that looks don't matter much. I have always been "attractive"...for what it is worth. Tall, blonde, blue eyes, fair skin. And just never really thought much about it. I don't pay much attention to clothes, I wear scrubs to work. Recently I had a fancy meeting to go to, and literally had nothing to wear. I usually just wear jeans and boots. My weight is probably my biggest issue. Which I am working on now.

My BF is not "handsome", but he is so good to me....I don't really notice that he is not exactly a "10". Just not an issue.
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