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What a ceramic pumpkin has to do with your self-worth
More than you think. (Stay with me, I promise it makes sense.)
Hi ,
In ninth grade studio art, the assignment was to create a jack-o-lantern out of clay. While everyone else’s looked more or less like a replica of the candy buckets you buy at Wal-Greens, mine had a look of its own.
As the wet clay spread under my fingertips, it caved in, creating an organic look. At first glance, it was ugly.
Instead of trying to sculpt it into conformist submission, I went with it. I gave it lopsided eyebrows and an unnaturally wide, crooked mouth.
If Weird Barbie had a pumpkin persona, this would have been it.
I loved it.
It was weird. it was mine, and it didn’t look like all those other Stepford Wife pumpkins. I knew there would never be another one just like it.
It wasn’t super functional (for a long time I stored my Ben and Jerry’s pay stubs in it, I have no idea why), it wasn’t cute, and there was no good place to put it, but I adored that thing.
The popular phrase “Strong is the new skinny” reminded me of my old pumpkin. (Stay with me here.)
Yay, we’re told! This is women’s empowerment, all the Instagram captions say. It’s amazing! It’s empowering! It’s the message our daughters need!
But is it?
I was hiking on one of my favorite Boulder trails (read: the only one I’m 100 percent confident I can navigate by myself without getting lost) early this morning, enjoying the leaves, which happen to be on fire (in the beautiful Autumn way not the wildfire way) right now, when it occurred to me that telling women to be strong is not the best.
Don’t get me wrong; I love being strong. It feels really good to squat a barbell that’s heavier than I am. I know lifting weights is excellent for building bone density and mitigating all the perimenopausal problems that are probably coming for me any day now.
So what’s wrong with celebrating a body that can do stuff!? Nothing at all, my friends.
What’s wrong is telling women to celebrate certain kinds of bodies.
Yeah, strong is a measure of what you can do while skinny is a measure of how you look, so the idea that we now worship strength over thinness is not the absolute worst.
But what if our bodies could just exist?
What if it didn’t matter if they were skinny OR strong? What if it didn’t matter how much or how hard we exercised? What if we told women our bodies were worthy no matter how they looked AND no matter what they were (or weren’t) capable of?
And I don’t mean telling women we’re beautiful no matter how we look, “flaws'' and all. Because when we say all bodies are beautiful, we’re buying into the paradigm that beauty matters, and that bodies have to be beautiful—or at least perceived as such—to matter.
What if, like my oddball pumpkin high school art project, we were amazing just for existing?
There are billions of people on this planet, but there is only one of you. Your gifts and talents and ways of perceiving and relating to your friends, family, and communities are unique to you.
When I brought my strange pumpkin home from school, I didn’t say “Look at my unconventionally beautiful but very functional pumpkin!” I never tried to convince anyone of its beauty (or its storage capacity) because that didn’t matter to me. What mattered was its singularity.
Yes, I know we live in a culture that does value thinness, able-bodied-ness, and fitness, And yes all this stuff does matter because we don’t live in a vacuum.
But we get to decide what we value and where our own sense of worthiness comes from.
Sound intriguing?
Here’s a quick exercise to try:
Get out a pen and a piece of paper.
Think of someone you love. Write down five things you love or appreciate about them.
Review them. Notice whether anything you wrote down pertained to their physical appearance or abilities.
Now write down five things you love or appreciate about yourself that don’t have to do with your physical appearance or abilities.
That’s it. That’s the whole exercise. The idea is to start training your brain to focus on aspects of yourself that have nothing to do with your physical body.
If you try it, let me know how it goes. And if you need support to start reframing the way you think about your body, let’s talk. I offer 1:1 intuitive eating coaching and I’d be honored to help you on your journey to finding peace with food and your body.
xo,
P.S. If you’re in the Boulder area, come join me at Runner’s Roost in Louisville this Wednesday November 1st for a free 30-minute talk on Intuitive Eating for Runner’s! There will be a chance to win prizes, including a free coaching session with me. We’ll start around 6:20 (at the conclusion of the 5:30 run which leaves from the store, for which all are welcome.)
It didn’t feel fair not to share a photo of the pumpkin.
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