Swallowing the Abacus: Thoughts on Self-Image

“Now, you’re thinking about this all wrong. It’s not so much what you look like; it’s what’s inside that he can’t stand.”

How To Train Your Dragon (2010)

I wanted a picture of a mirror, so this is the one in my room at home. I bought it in The Boot Room in Bristol (http://bootroombristol.com/) and I think it’s gorgeous.

Lack of body confidence is a major problem in our society. A key contributing factor to this problem is the obsession of modern media with physical appearance.

On these two statements, I think most of us would be prepared to agree. Indeed, many of us, it seems, are prepared to be very vocal about it: take, for instance, the 378 complaints received by the Advertising Standards Agency earlier this year about Protein World’s controversial ‘Are You Beach Body Ready?’ poster.¹ Vehement condemnations of the message the advert was felt to be promoting – that there is only one acceptable way for a body to look, and all other shapes are inferior – littered my Facebook newsfeed, and, I don’t doubt, very many other people’s, for some time.

Still, I’ve spent enough time testing a housemate of mine who studies Clinical Psychology from her beautifully-written-up revision notes to know that, when it comes to the way people feel about themselves, getting rid of a negative idea isn’t enough. An alternative, positive idea has to be actively put in its place. My question, therefore, is this: when I am busy decrying the media for telling people that conformation to its impossible standards is what gives their appearance value, what alternative message am I advocating? What are the grounds on which a person should feel body-confident?

Possibility 1: The ‘Girls Like That’ Solution – because I consider myself more attractive than other people.

Girls Like That is a play by Evan Placey, which was first performed in 2013, although I didn’t know any of that when I saw it as part of a series of A-level Theatre Studies performances by students in my younger sister’s year.² The plot revolves largely around the online dispersal of a naked photo of a schoolgirl named Scarlett and the reactions of her classmates, told largely through a kind of communal narration consisting of the characters’ private thoughts, rather than dialogue as such. Even in the abridged (though nevertheless impressive) version I saw, there was enough clever and pertinent social commentary to fuel numerous blog posts, but, in this context, I’m going to zone in on a scene where Scarlett’s classmates analyse and criticise the photo in painstaking detail.

“And I feel good because her arms are bony,” says one girl.

“And I feel good because her nail polish is totally chipped,” says another.

“And I feel good because her belly button is an outie.”

“And I feel good because my breasts are bigger than hers.”

“And I feel good because my breasts are smaller than her abnormally large ones.”

You get the picture. What I found especially striking about this scene was how ridiculous it seemed to make such harsh comparisons out loud – and yet, how often, in the privacy of my own mind, do I use the exact same logic, that I like a particular aspect of my appearance because I like it more than another person’s equivalent aspect? Stating the obvious, perhaps, but body confidence that relies on the denigration of others hardly seems like something to be encouraged: it’s certainly not consistent with the kind of selfless and loving attitude I’d like to have.

Possibility 2: The ‘Dove Real Beauty Sketches’ Solution – because other people think I am attractive.

Having discarded belittling the appearance of others as a route to body confidence, we might now consider its apparent opposite: praising the appearance of others. Another product of 2013 was Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches project. A forensic artist drew two sketches of each of a number of women: one based on how each woman described herself, the other based on how a stranger described her. The women were then shown the two sketches, and each preferred the drawing based on the stranger’s description to that based on her own. Dove used this to support its tagline: ‘You’re more beautiful than you think.’³

I don’t by any means wish to condemn the idea of this project out of hand: it makes a good point about the contrast between how we tend to talk about our own appearance, and how we tend to talk about that of others. It also encourages to be celebratory of one another. Nevertheless, I do wonder whether the implication can really be a good one that I should consider myself beautiful because others consider me so. It seems a very shaky foundation for body confidence: do I have no inherent quality, leaving aside the limited, subjective and fickle opinions of other human beings, that means I should be happy with the way I look?

Possibility 3: The ‘Miranda Hart’ Solution – because I am unique.

Definitely one of the funniest books I have read.

I love Miranda Hart’s work: she is endlessly talented, hilarious and relatable.⁴ Once again, however, I’m going to zoom in on one particular aspect, namely, how on page 152 of her wonderful autobiography, she challenges her reader thus: “Look in the mirror and say, ‘There is none other like you and for that reason alone you are beautiful.’”⁵

This idea seems more promising: I can be confident in my own appearance because of its inherent uniqueness. Certainly it avoids the issue of relying on other people to define my self-image. Ironically enough, however, in doing so, it leaves me with another issue, a missing link in the logic: why is uniqueness beautiful? On whose authority is this the case?

Possibility 4: The ‘Swallow an Abacus’ Solution – because it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

(I apologise for the terrible pun – unless you, like me, have a great but irrational fondness for terrible puns, in which case, you’re very welcome.⁶ At least the title of this post makes sense now.)

You may well have a sneaking suspicion where I’m going with this: if I’m looking for the ultimate authority on my body, it would seem to make sense to consult the architect responsible for it. I might open my Bible and have a flick through, but it can be a dense and daunting book if you don’t know where to look, so I might turn instead to the Internet and type ‘Bible verses about self-image’ into my favourite search engine.⁷ Whereupon, after a couple of clicks, I would discover that the verse with overwhelmingly most ‘helpful votes’ on openbible.info is 1 Samuel 16: 7 – “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’”

Now, I intend absolutely no disrespect to this verse. After all, it’s God-breathed truth as much as any other bit of the Bible, and I don’t doubt that it proves very comforting in certain circumstances. Equally, I think there are a couple of traps to avoid when looking at it in a body-confidence context.

1)   Firstly, I think there’s a temptation to cast myself as the ‘good guy’, the victim, in this scenario, in the same vein as any children’s TV programme where the good-looking, popular kids act as villains picking on the show’s heroes (who, we as the viewers are told, are far less good-looking and popular, though, in my experience, this often seems rather inaccurate). Poor me, I might think, other people only see my outward appearance, and they’re horrible about it – but it’s OK, because God sees my heart, and HE knows that I’m actually a really great person, even if nobody else can see it.

The thing is, ‘the Lord looks on the heart’ is actually a rather terrifying statement. God doesn’t just see the parts of me I allow other people to see. He sees everything: everything I’ve done when I thought nobody was looking; everything I’ve said to a select group whom I trust not to repeat it; everything I’ve dared to think, in some dark, uncivilised corner of my mind, only because no other human being will ever know about it. Things that, if the world were told about them, I would feel so utterly overcome by shame that – well, I’d wish the ground would swallow me up.⁸

However physically repugnant another human being may find my appearance, I’m quite sure it’s as nothing compared to how morally repugnant God, judge of all his creation, would be well within his rights to declare my heart. And so the verse above is a reminder of my desperate need for his grace, and his astonishing goodness in offering it to me freely, so that, despite the state of my heart, I need not be rejected.

2)   The second trap is that I might get the impression that my body is completely irrelevant. If God’s only interested in the heart, why should the packaging it comes in have any significance at all? In fact, why am I even looking for a justification as to why I should feel confident about my appearance? Surely I’d do better to try to ignore the fact that I even have one?

This doesn’t seem a very satisfactory proposal to me. I’d consider an ability to appreciate beauty to be one of the privileges of being human, and, for most of us, that’s going to include a visual component. Is that privilege somehow not a privilege at all, but something to be spurned and suppressed?

Possibility 5: The ‘Pinnacle of Creation’ Solution – because I am designed to be beautiful.

To that last question, I believe the Bible answers a resounding ‘no’. For starters, a flick through Song of Songs is enough to confirm that there is nothing unbiblical about finding another human being beautiful – but our inherent beauty goes deeper than that.

In Genesis 1, at the end of each day of creation, God sees that the product of his day’s work is ‘good’. It isn’t until the sixth day, however, when he has finished creating human beings, that he deems it ‘very good’.⁹ That means you and I are the pinnacle of God’s good creation. Think of anything beautiful in the whole of creation: waterfalls and rainbows and roses and autumn leaves and adorable baby animals and mountains and shooting stars and galaxies and sunlight on the sea. Now think about this: the one who dreamed all of that up, and brought it into existence out of nothingness, thinks you and I are his best and most beautiful creation. Visually, yes, and in every other way as well. (So, going back to Possibility 3, who says there’s value in uniqueness? God does, because he deliberately made us as unique individuals and deemed it ‘very good’ that he had.)

Seriously though, who doesn’t love waterfalls?

Right now our beauty isn’t all it could be, because of the effects of mankind’s wrongdoing have thrown the whole of creation askew.¹⁰ But God promises us that one day, he will give us new bodies – fully-grown flowers, as opposed to the seeds we are at the moment – and our beauty will never be damaged or decay.¹¹ In the beginning, God made us in his image, to reflect aspects of his brilliance; one day, he will remake us to bear his image totally.¹²

So, why should I be confident about my appearance?

Because God fashioned it.

Because he considers it part of the absolute peak of all his magnificent creation, and, as creator of everything, God is the final authority on everything.

Because he deems it worth bringing into full flower one day, as part of his perfect, everlasting new creation.

Because I am designed to be beautiful.

 Footnotes

¹ If you want to check my source, or need a reminder of what all the fuss was about, there’s a BBC news article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33340301.

² My sister’s group performed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and I thought they made a very good job of it, especially considering how heavily they had to abridge it for the twenty-minute time limit. I first saw Curious Incident… as a live screening of the National Theatre’s version, which I would definitely recommend, and which, by coincidence, is currently touring the UK: http://www.curiousonstage.com/tour/.

³ The film is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=litXW91UauE.

⁴ Here, by way of evidence, is a tiny clip of one of my favourite moments of the Miranda sitcom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLeBIeMy9Sc. People who don’t find this funny baffle me.

⁵ Hart, Miranda, Is It Just Me?, London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd (2012). Dear oh dear, academic essay referencing has ruined me.

⁶ In fact, since I’m in a generous mood, have another one: You can’t run through a campsite; you can only ran, because it’s past tents. Courtesy of the Grammarly Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/grammarly?fref=ts.

⁷ Which is, incidentally, Ecosia (https://www.ecosia.org/), because of its policy of spending the money it makes on planting trees. I don’t think it’s any worse than Google in terms of search results, either.

⁸ Bonus point if you watched the video earlier and had another giggle just now.

⁹ Check for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+1&version=NKJV.

¹⁰ Pretty much the entire Bible from Genesis 3 onwards evidences this in some way or other.

¹¹ 1 Corinthians 15: 35-49. Have a read: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+15&version=ESVUK.

¹² Genesis 1: 27 and 1 Corinthians 15: 49; also see Genesis 2: 7.

Things Of Which I Am Afraid

“You’re always going to be afraid, even if you learn to hide it. Fear is like a companion, a constant companion, always there.”

Doctor Who S8 E4, ‘Listen’ (2014)

1) Starting a blog.

But let’s dig a little deeper than that, shall we? After all, I’m not afraid of word processing, or using the Internet, or building words into paragraphs such as to express an idea.

I’m afraid of starting a blog because I’m afraid of starting anything that isn’t going to be perfect. Getting up later than I planned leaves the whole day tainted by my failure. The first crossing out on what was a beautiful, clean, new page before I had the presumption to start writing on it is like a dull blow reminding me of my inadequacy. Burning a batch of shortbread,¹ or smudging my nail varnish before it dries, or missing a side quest while gaming in whatever format, or consistently catching a wrong string in a violin piece I know is within my capability - it all just screams out the inevitability that everything I do in this life is going to be flawed. And that makes me afraid to try.

I’m also afraid of big drops on rollercoasters, so this picture seemed vaguely appropriate.

2) Starting this blog.

It’s called ‘Through Faith and Fiction’ because that’s what it’s going to be about. My faith is, and, perhaps more importantly, should be, so central to my life that I can’t picture writing a blog that didn’t heavily involve it. (Now is probably a good time to declare myself as a follower of Jesus, the Christ. It can be awkward to try to slip that into conversation later on.) Of course, part and parcel of discussing faith is confronting big, controversial questions about which people frequently have opinions held very strongly and close to the heart, which makes it scary turf from the start.

Still, bizarrely enough, the other half of my title scares me too, indeed, for the very reason that it isn’t a big and controversial and concerned-with-the-eternal-destiny-of-the-human-soul type topic. I love fiction: stories take hold of me in a way little else does.² That’s precisely the problem. Even though I know how trivial it ultimately is, fiction too easily sets itself up as an idol for me. Yet story itself provides a lens which adds to my understanding of so many other things, including my faith – after all, the Bible is a story, and full of stories. So, in short, I’m afraid of getting the balance wrong.

3) Starting this blog non-anonymously.

Dearest Internet age, how good of you to save us from having to take the consequences for what we say by offering a cloak of anonymity beneath whose disguise the most mild-mannered of us will happily screech accusations and abuse at strangers!

This fear really stems from the two above. Firstly, if my work is bound to be flawed, when those flaws emerge, it will be obvious whom to blame for them. Secondly, if I say something controversial about a touchy subject here on this blog, I’ll have to stand by it in real life as well.

4) Letting fear get the better of me.

At first, ‘Listen’ seemed like a promising episode of Doctor Who. (To remind you, the premise was investigation of the existence of a creature perfectly adapted to hiding its presence: how could one know whether it existed or not?) However, I really disliked the speech Clara made about fear towards the end of the episode.³ The idea, as expressed earlier in the episode, of fear being a superpower in an immediate set of frightening circumstances because it makes one able to run faster, jump higher, fight harder, be more alert, makes sense enough. But fear the constant companion? That’s not a superpower; it’s a crippling disability.

Fear stops you investigating because you’re too afraid of what you might find out. Fear stops you giving your honest opinion because you’re too afraid of what people will think of it. Fear stops you trying because you’re too afraid of failing.

The good news is, we don’t always have to be afraid.

The famous line ‘perfect love casts out fear’ is from 1 John 4: 18, but the logic of the verses 13-18 crescendos something like this:

We know that God remains in us because he has given us the Holy Spirit,

And we who have the Spirit are those who have seen, and been convinced by, the evidence that Jesus, God’s Son, was sent to save the world;

Therefore, God remains in anyone who declares as much,

Which means that that person can directly know God’s love,

And so can trust it,

Because God is love – love itself, pure, unadulterated, perfect love;

So if God is in us,

That means we have in us perfect love,

In which we can have confidence and so be without fear:

Perfect love casts out fear,

Because fear is present where there is the threat of some negative consequence,

But no negative consequence looks like much to be afraid of when we have confidence in the perfect love of God.⁴

Not being afraid is therefore deeply, deeply rooted in a belief in God’s love, manifest in his gift of his Son to save us. Once we believe in him, we have no reason to be afraid. In fact, even more than that: we are not permitted to be afraid, because fear is contrary to the character of the God whom we are aiming to follow and imitate. Being rid of fear frees us up to love – and love is the real superpower.⁵

Of course, casting out fear is an ongoing process, and none of us can claim to have reached the end of it yet. Still, by the grace of God, I do believe, bit by bit, I’m getting braver.

Footnotes

¹ I use this recipe: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/butter_shortbread_74896. I’m not sure whether the dough is supposed to be quite as crumbly as it proves when I make it, but it’s good once it’s baked. (Unless I burn it, obviously.)

² Beyond that – because I can never resist the opportunity to share fun Classical etymologies – the word ‘fiction’ comes from the Latin ‘fingo’ (fingere, finxi, fictum), which, according to the ever-trusty dictionary of Lewis and Short (available via the Word Study Tool here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/search), means to form, shape or fashion, and hence to imagine, contrive, invent. So, in a loose sort of way, ‘fiction’ could include all sorts of products of human creativity: music and poetry and fashion and architecture and visual arts and so on.

³ You can find the whole speech at http://www.doctorwhoquotes.net/listen/, though it’s rather oddly split in half and the second part wrongly attributed to the Doctor.

⁴ Here’s the whole chapter for your comparison: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John+4&version=NKJV.

⁵ See also Blimey Cow’s video, ‘The Opposite of Love’, which I reckon hits the nail on the head about why fear hinders love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akayzakrTs0.