Today, I like my hands.
They have never been my favorite feature. My fingers always seemed too short and stubby. I liked my wrists: they were just the write amount of bony, looking tough and elegant. I always favored how my whole arm looked with my fist clenched. Then today I was putting on a pair of earrings and was taken aback. There were my hands, next to the side of my face, and they looked right. Strong and capable, graceful in a practical sort of way. My fingers looked well-proportioned, finishing off in perfectly identical fingernails. These hands that can put on earrings or bake cookies or play guitar. They focus camera lenses and hold hands and grip a steering wheel. I saw that they were good.
This might be part of maturing. After decades of continuously changing tumult, I have stopped growing long enough to get to know myself. I know how high I can reach, and I no longer trip due to the unfamiliar length of my legs (this does not stop me from tripping due to my bad depth-perception and my innate lack of grace).
This may all seem narcissistic. I certainly have my days where I overestimate myself, but my self-absorption takes the form of deprecation just as often. There are days I feel I am drowning in the ocean of things I cannot accomplish, the things for which I am not good enough. As I am getting a little older I find self-love may mean discipline as often as it means indulgence, or even more so.
We’re all wandering around, trying to find the good days. I’m not sure, but I think I may have the secret to discovering more of them: giving into myself less in order to give myself more. I can give into the thoughts that my hands may never grace a jewelry catalogue or that they haven’t always seemed perfect to me, or I can give myself the gift of appreciation for how amazing these two hands are.
We often think we are helping ourselves when we work to get what we want. That if we desire something, to deprive ourselves is unwise, even unnatural. That is, for lack of a better word, stupid. If we pause to truly think about it we know the things that are best require determination and self-denial over a period of time. Olympians do not stand on the podium because they gave in to their desires. They ordered their desires, and pursued the greatest one.
I recently gave up coffee for a period of time. I am incredibly fond of coffee. Before my fast I was drinking two to three cups a day. My friends were concerned about the caffeine drop off, but I felt fine. What I really missed was the pet comfort: wrapping my hands around the warm mug, inhaling the aroma. One day I had enough and decided to indulge and have a cup. I was having a stressful, busy day, full of important meetings in coffee shops. I agonized over the decision with a friend, weighing my options.
“It’s just a cup of coffee,” I said to her, “and in the end it doesn’t matter if I drink it. I mean, in the end I’m denying myself because I want to train myself to hold off and make good decisions on the things that really matter. That’s the whole point – this is just a cup of coffee.”
I ordered tea.
I can keep ordering those cups of coffee, or I can think about the long term. The coffee example breaks down, because really there is nothing wrong with drinking it, and now that the predetermined time period is over I am very happy to reunite with those little cups of mahogany goodness every morning, but the parallels to the rest of my life are easy to see.
A friend recently gave me a book by David G. Benner, and I read a line in it today that I loved:
“With a little reflection, most of us can become aware of masks that we first adopted as strategies to avoid feelings of vulnerability but that have become parts of our social self. Tragically, we settle easily for pretense, and a truly authentic self often seems illusory.”
We indulge these masks because they make us feel safe. My masks allow me to protect myself and to present myself as who I want to be. However I find that as I push myself to lay down these masks my truest desire to be authentically alive is answered. It is sometimes uncomfortable, but I am able to see myself more truly for who I am, and become the person I want to be, not just pretend to be some better version of myself who is a lesser version of my true identity.
That authentic self: she has beautiful hands.