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them in that process.” I thought about that statement for a long time. It’s powerful to observe your parents’ willingness to reexamine their choices; it’s even more powerful when you think about how your children will one day ask the same of you.
When we choose growth over perfection, we choose empathy and connection. I use the term grounding because in order to examine where we are, where we want to go and how we want to get there, we must have a level of self-acceptance about who we are.
the interviews. The first woman had great contempt for the person she used to be. She told me, “I was fat and disgusting. I can’t believe I ever looked like that.” She went on to tell me how much she disliked overweight women. She told me that her mother was very slim and was constantly “on her” about her weight. She said that she has two daughters and she watches everything they eat.
The second told me that she had struggled with her weight for twenty-five years. She said she was an overweight child and didn’t get into shape until she turned thirty. When I asked her how she felt when she thought back to her life when she was overweight, she said, “It’s just part of who I am. I got married and had my children during that period of time, I lost my mom during my twenties—just like everyone else I had good times and bad times.”
shouldn’t judge people based on how they look. They love me and think I’m a great mom. I told them if all you saw was a fat woman, you’d miss all the good stuff.
One destructive obsession related to perfectionism is the fascination with celebrity culture. We desperately flip through magazines to find out all of the intimate details about the stars we love and the ones we hate. We want to know who has lost weight, how they decorate their houses, what they eat, what they feed their dogs . . . you name it. If they eat it, wear it, own
Celebrities also bring us closer to another highly coveted asset—coolness. The
her book The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families, Mary Pipher speaks wisely about the real threat that the media poses to our families.
David Letterman won’t be helping out if our car battery dies on a winter morning. Donald Trump won’t bring groceries over if Dad loses his job. These vicarious relationships create a new kind of loneliness—the loneliness of people whose relationships are with personae instead of persons.”
In addition to fostering perfectionism and loneliness (which are often connected), there is the issue of comparing our lives with the lives of celebrities. We watch hours of shows that do nothing more than detail their comings and goings. And consciously or unconsciously, we compare our lives to theirs. In my research with both women and
Dr. Pipher also explains this phenomenon in the context of the new media community. She writes, “The electronic community is less diverse than real life. The problems it deals with are not the problems real people face.
In our culture, the fear and shame of being ordinary is very real. In fact, many of the older women I interviewed spoke about looking back on their lives and grieving for the extraordinary things that would never come to pass. We seem to measure the value of people’s contributions (and sometimes their entire lives) by their level of public recognition. In other words, worth is measured by fame and fortune. Our culture is quick to dismiss quiet, ordinary, hardworking
we are going to recognize and accept what makes us human, including our imperfections and less-than-extraordinary lives, we must embrace our vulnerabilities. This is extremely difficult, because we are afraid to be vulnerable.
One concept that emerged across the interviews is what I call the vulnerability hangover. The vulnerability hangover directly relates to our fear of vulnerability, and unfortunately, most of us have experienced it.
When we begin to work on our shame resilience, the need to reach out and talk about our experiences can be a very strong force. So strong, in fact, that it sometimes leads us to purging with people with whom we have not developed the kind of relationship that can absorb that information.
When it comes to sharing information, it would be nice to believe that most of us have the ability to recognize the right people, the right times and the right ways to share. But alas, the reality is that most of us have turned to people we barely know and thrown up vulnerability all over them.
