I keep reading stories about women like Jennifer Lopez who seemed to have given up WAY too much for controlling, small people like Marc Anthony.
I’m sorry, but did you see the “solo” performance JLo was supposed to provide on American Idol? Thanks to Marc’s input, she ended up shimmying around Marc while he sang. Amazingly, that was Marc’s idea.
I remember dating a guy once who told me I needed to wear more dresses, buy sheer pantyhose, and cut my hair. I told him he needed to take a hike. I liked my jeans, my rubber pantyhose that never got a run in them, and my crazy hair. If he didn’t like those things, I didn’t need him.
Virginia Woolf once said – “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.”
I have beautiful, magnificent female friends who are wasting away to nothing because their husbands or friends think they’re too fat. Or they’re compromising their intellect by “dumbing down” for someone who isn’t half as bright as they are.
In a great book called Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self by Sarah Ban Breathnach, the author says: “. . . every woman must at some point in her life become courageous enough to turn away from the prism of her relationships as the reflector of her worth.”
She goes on to provide great advice: “Today, pick up a mirror and look in it until you see Spirit’s truth reflected back. You are a woman of beauty, intelligence, vision, warmth, power, influence, strength, wit generosity, compassion and soul. And if you don’t see this, you’ve been looking for your worth in all the wrong faces . . .”
If someone criticizes you just hold up your mirror so it’s facing your critic (like a cross to a vampire) and reflect the statement back to them. That’s who it was intended for anyway. And, in my own little version of the Paradoxical Commandments, if someone tells you . . .
You’re not beautiful . . . . be beautiful anyway.
You’re not intelligent . . . be intelligent anyway.
You’re not witty . . . be witty anyway.
Because nobody gets to tell you who you are, and no weak little person gets to bring you down.
You don’t have to shimmy around any scrawny little controller. You’re a Dame. Move on and take care charge of your own self-worth, and wear those rubber pantyhose with pride!
By the way, if you’re interested in excavating your own self-worth, read the following: