The Pursuit of Perfection

Messina 1

The Pursuit of Perfection

By Lisa Messina

Messina 2

Sometimes when I can’t fall asleep at night, I pretend I have a magic device that lets me customize my body any way I would like. I mentally go from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. I imagine the changes I would make, leaving no detail untouched. I make myself perfect. This pursuit for perfection continues into the next day. Even after I wake up, I search for the ideals from my dreams in the arms of the Internet. I sit through my classes scrolling through Pinterest, half listening to the lectures. I stitch together aspects of the perfect body, like a glamorous Frankenstein. I dissect pictures and I put them behind a board I’ve labeled “Body Goals.” There, I create different versions of the most ideal body type imaginable, but I know that I will never be able to achieve that goal outside of my dreams or my Pinterest boards We live in the era of the super model. This is the age of the impossibly high standards, some, biologically impossible. Despite knowing this, we still struggle to find a balance between what we are and what we wish to be, many of us victims to the voices of the media telling us to change. With all the Photoshop and air brushing we see in the media and culture, society has created a gilded idol, which many of us worship – whether we mean to or not. Men and women both are inflicted with this flesh-eating virus of the beauty standard. It eats away our confidence and our self-respect, until we are blinded to our own beauty. It leaves us empty, ready for society to fill our brains with its false standards of beauty.

In this way, far too many of us let a part of ourselves die, no longer having the ability to love ourselves the way we might have when we were children. I do not know when my ability to self-love left, but it has not been around for a while. It feels like I have I have been struggling with my body image all my life. I know it got worse when I was gifted an IPod touch for my thirteenth birthday and had unrestricted access to the internet for the first time. I remember seeing countless ads for flat abs and summer bodies. I was overwhelmed; I suddenly found

Messina 3

myself needing a thigh gap in order to be able to wear shorts. I was healthy and active but still, I was deeply unhappy with my body. At the young age of thirteen I was engulfed in cultural standards that my thick, developing body could not compare to.

By the time I went to high school I was incredibly insecure about my image; I could hardly go out in public. I hated myself. My hair was too dull, my nose too big, and my body too hairy and large. I kept looking at many other girls thinking, how can I be more like them? I was so disgusted with myself that I wouldn’t go swimming with my friends or go to school dances for fear of how I would look. It was a long time before I truly became comfortable in my own skin.

It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school that I started healing myself of the ailment that is the pursuit of perfection. It was the fall and I was thinking about a summer job. One of my older friends told me that I could be a lifeguard, and that I should join the swim team because the experience would help with my guard test. I liked the idea; the thing I didn’t like was the speedo swim suits we were required to wear. The suits were impossibly tight; the bottom rose high over the hips, there was no padding in them so everyone was almost guaranteed to see your nipples, and the back was almost completely open. The thought of being in a swim suit like that in front of people was terrifying. I couldn’t be out in public with my bathing suit without covering myself up. My friend could see anxiety written all over my face and assured me that not everyone on the swim team was skinny as a rail and that I should just try.

Surprising myself, I signed up to join the swim team, with one exception: I would not wear the speedo suit. My mom went out and bought me a black one piece with pads for my breasts, one that covered most of my back and butt. Looking back, I know this was ridiculous in a sports atmosphere, but that was the only way I felt safe. I remember feeling anxious in the locker room the first day of practice, trying to change in privacy, but no one else was feeling that

Messina 4

way. Though the girls where modest in changing, they did walk around chatting and giggling in their underwear. I would never have done that in a million years.

As the year continued, I fell in love with swimming and a lot of things started to change.

The first thing was that I started to lose weight and I started to be more comfortable with my body. With that comfort came a growing confidence. I became more relaxed in the locker rooms and started doing things that I wouldn’t have been comfortable with in the past, like not wearing a bra in public. I slowly had the grand realization that no one cared. No one cared if I looked bad in a swim suit and the world didn’t stop just because I decided to wear makeup one day. I started to see that I was so consumed by looking good that I was being blinded to life’s ambition. Swim team offered an amazing opportunity and made me realize that my insecurities were keeping me from my destiny.

One year later, as a senior I became a co-captain of the tea. I was finally able to feel confident in the speedo suits and I bought a few for myself for the summer! I was growing more confident in my skin and it felt liberating. In the locker room, I could just change and forget about hiding my body under a towel. Without my insecurities, I was free to enjoy myself, away from the heavy burden of hiding myself away. Are there some days I put on my swim suit and turn in the mirror and feel thirteen again? Yes, and I don’t think that part of me will ever be gone. But for now, I am far more accepting of who I am and how I look, and swim team was a big part of this change. I am afraid to think of a world where I never saw this change, a world where I was too afraid to swim.

I am trying to recognize the difference between what is real and what is not. I know I will never be a Victoria Secret model, nor will I ever be like the advertisements on TV. My goal is to just be the best version of myself I can be. A thigh gap might not be in my future, but I can work

Messina 5

on eating healthier and losing weight. It is all about what is achievable and knowing the difference. But with that said, this is harder than I thought it would be.

I am aware of how many people are affected by a negative body image. I am aware of how much this closes with a sad ending, like in Marge Piercy’s poem, “Barbie Doll.” This poem is about a girl who loves herself, but because of society and pressures on her to look pretty she slowly starts to hate who she is and dies at the end of the poem. I don’t want that for my life. I am more than a doll on a shelf. I learned from my experience that I really must limit my intake of the media. It is so easy to be caught up in glamourous pictures of men and women, images which are supposed to be enticing and are designed to make you swoon to increase product purchases.

Without self-hate and insecurities of consumers, the beauty and weight loss industry would have nothing.

Society’s image of what the perfect body should look like stole more from me then I could’ve imagined. I had no idea how much society and the media influenced me physically and mentally. This perfect body image stole my confidence and diminished my freedom. It replaced any healthy body ideal I had with something computer generated. The media altered how I view and accept myself as fast as it takes to scan an image, and the aftermath is a constant struggle, – fighting moment by moment – to earn back what was lost to me. Insecurity is not something that comes with age, it is something that is conditioned deep within most of us in an image-based culture where literal impossible body standards reign. Confidence is an uphill battle for me, a constant tug-a-war of internal conflict. But I won’t give in, as hard as it is, because my body is worth fighting for.