Why Thank You!

A friend of mine and I have made an informal pact to start changing the way we, and maybe the girls in our youth group, respond to compliments. It has been our observation that we as women can never take a compliment without qualifying it first. The general course of conversation in regards to a compliment usually goes like this:

"You look so good today!"
"Really? Oh, my hair is such a mess. I couldn't get it to do anything today. I just don't know what to do with it. It's going crazy."
"Oh. Well, I thought you look good."
"Thanks, but, yeah, my hair looks horrible."

Or,
"Wow, I love that dress."
"Oh, I just got this at Walmart. It was only $___. Really, I guess it's not too bad for a Walmart find, but it's kind of cheap."

We as women do this all the time. Perhaps it is our insecurity, or perhaps we really want the complimenter to reiterate what they have said. I'm not sure, but we can never simply say thank you. Instead we have to qualify everything that we think is wrong with us and apologize for it. And women from the age of thirteen and over do this. I've never see a young girl complain about her appearance, she'll often say "thank you" and run off to see her friends. It's as if once we hit puberty, suddenly we can no longer acknowledge what is good in us, but must apologize and moderate and make exceptions.

So, my friend and I decided that we should teach our girls, whom we have heard do this again and again, to simply smile and say thank you when they are complimented, and hopefully to accept what is said to them. Only, we realized we should start with ourselves.

I've found this to be a very difficult exercise. I am trying, but I'm not always good at simply accepting the compliment, and even worse at believing it. I once had a very dear friend write back to me, lecturing me for calling myself a "chubster" (yes, I did). She went on to rebuke me for consistently "putting myself down." I wanted to argue with her. I wanted to point out to all the very real factors in my appearance that lead me to labeling myself as "pudgy" and "tubby" and other such words. I have them in my arsenal. But I also wanted to acknowledge the compliment she gave me in genuinely believing that I am none of those things. I found I couldn't do both. I couldn't accept and acknowledge or appreciate her comments if I was writing back to her the long list of proofs I have of my overweight "reality". The two just didn't mesh. So in the end, I didn't send her any of them. I acknowledged that I wanted to argue with her, but that I really wanted to recognize the good she saw in me, even if I couldn't see it myself.

The result has been a humbling experience. I consider myself the expert on my physical appearance. Who knows it better than I do? I'm the one who stares at it every day in the mirror, assessing, critiquing. It doesn't help that facebook displays ads of women who can barely pinch a centimeter of fat off their bodies and have headlines of "Want to lose 50lbs by the summer??" But I'm learning that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. My boyfriend, inexplicably to me, seems to think I am good-looking (how much so is still undefined). I have difficulty seeing it, but then, that's the point. He may not see me the way I see me. Neither does my friend see me the way I see me. And perhaps, I do not see myself so clearly. I see all the faults, measure it against those ridiculous ads that make me want to stab my computer screen, rather than seeing what might be good and pleasing about myself. And I won't qualify that last statement, no matter how much I want to.