52. Doesn't Everyone Sit Like This?: Accept Yourself Exactly As You Are
Two business stories to introduce today’s topic.
Story One: The Trip to Dallas.
After quitting my job in 2014 to start an online business, I was excited when my first mentor invited me (well, and everyone else in her program) to a three-day event in Dallas. The purpose was for people to meet in person and learn directly from her and her colleagues: panel discussions, exercises, goal-setting, that sort of thing.
Another student, a local woman in her 40s, and I decided to share a room and travel together. After checking in and entering our hotel room, she immediately withdrew a package of baby wipes and started wiping down every surface–including drawer handles, doorknobs, the remote, and so on. (This was long before Covid, remember). So she’s squeamish, I thought. To each her own.
As we unpacked our things, she withdrew a fresh pillow case and replaced the one that had been put on the bed. Okay, so maybe she had allergies. Whatevs.
But then, nestled within her sweaters and pyjamas, she withdrew a. . . teddy bear. A full-sized, well-worn, fuzzy and squishy teddy bear. You know, the kind a four year-old would play with.
“This is Mr. Buttons,” she said, in a voice that had suddenly changed to that of a cartoon character.
“He’s been my friend since I was five. And he always travels with me.” She smiled and cocked her head, waiting. As if she expected me to pull my own Mr. Zipper out of my bag.
“Oh. . . that’s nice,” I managed to say.
For the following three days, Mr. Buttons remained visible at all times, either propped on her pillow or in her arms. Outside the hotel room, she was a perfectly average 40-something, calmly discussing email lists, processes and goal-setting with colleagues. But within that room, she was a five year-old who hugged and kissed Mr. Buttons.
Perhaps what struck me most about the experience was her utter lack of self-consciousness about the (decidedly unusual) habit of bringing a childhood toy with you on a business trip.
While we’d been acquainted for about a year by then, we were in no way close friends or confidantes. But it was clear she didn’t find the habit remarkable, so there was no need to feel self-conscious.
I must admit, I was a bit envious of her ability to be unapologetically herself, without explanation or apology. Up until my 50s, I was basically a self-loathing teenager who felt as if everything about her physical appearance was atypical and “weird.” (Looking back, I realize the error. Of course I was weird. But why feel any need to explain?).
Story Two: The Trip to Orange County, California
Several years later, I was part of a mastermind scheduled to meet in person four times per year. Our coach lived in California, so our meetings took place there (a very welcome distraction to this “I-hate-winter-more-than-words-can-describe” Canadian gal).
At one point, we were asked to participate in a confidence-building exercise (I first wrote about it in this post).
Here it is: choose one of the following tasks and execute it. Choices included lying on your back on the concrete pathway of a busy outdoor mall for three minutes; singing a song out loud in a crowded elevator; asking a stranger to give you $100; and a few others that evade my memory.
My choice was to lie on the ground. I attempted this feat in the presence of two other colleagues who stood off to the side for moral support. As I sat, then lay, on the ground, my mind swirled with what I’d say when asked why a grown woman remained supine on the concrete. “Oh, I’m fine, really, thanks, I’ll get up in a minute”? “No need to worry, this is really all part of a huge experiment!”?? I braced myself to wave off any offers of help.
So, what happened? NOTHING. Not a single person asked if I was okay, Not one soul stopped to see if I needed help. Not a sole individual, really, even glanced in my direction (which does make on wonder what would have happened if I had been, truly, in need of help).
It was a humbling and simultaneously energizing activity. Because the truth is: no one really cares what you do or what you look like as long as it doesn’t affect them.
So why, then, all this angst about our personal quirks and idiosyncrasies? Who cares?
Life is too short to stress over others’ opinions. If you’re not hurting someone else, do whatever the heck you want.
Unfortunately, it took me a long time (more than five decades) to reach this conclusion.
Dogs, on the other hand, seem to know this concept from birth. There’s no such thing as an “awkwardly self-conscious” dog. Even dogs who have different body composition. Even dogs who look very different from their fellow canines.
One thing we noticed about Zoey early on is her extra-long body (in fact, that’s one of the hubs’s nicknames for her: Zoey Longbody). Because her torso-to-leg ratio is a little off, her gait is more like a waddle, with distinct portions of her body that seem to move independent of the others, like an articulated streetcar.
When it comes to sitting, Zoey must position her back legs at an unusually-splayed angle to compensate for the excess midsection. It’s a little comical to humans, but she doesn’t seem to mind:
Then there are all the erratic white hairs and whiskers that ostensibly grow from every pore on her face. And the distinct black mole on her tongue, which, for the longest time, I thought was a speck of food stuck there.
Does she care one whit about any of this? Heck, no. She plays, she pounces, she twirls, she leaps and runs and thoroughly enjoys all aspects of her life–all without the slightest bit of self-consciousness. After all, as long as her body lets her do what she wants to do, why worry?
One more story to wrap up the post.
To say I was an awkward tween and teenager would be a gross understatement. I was taller than most of my friends, overweight with oversized buck teeth (no, really. The orthodontist who corrected my bite informed me he had to create custom braces for my two front teeth because they were huge “horse teeth” in size). My hair was stringy, my eyes too big, and moles speckled my face.
To read that description, you’d think I was a younger Weird Al Yankovic in drag. But looking at old photos, what I see is a slightly chubby kid who, until that time, had been perfectly happy with her appearance and habits. It wasn’t until others (read: boys) began to remark on these traits that they became “unacceptable.”
That younger girl wasn’t yet aware that she should be ashamed of her appearance. I suspect that, left to my own devices, I would have eventually lost the weight (as I did, though it took a while) and been perfectly okay with the interval of avoirdupois.
Instead, for the following three or so decades, I attempted to fit in, blend into the background, be as unassuming as possible.
During my grade school and high school days, there was no such thing yet as “body positivity.” No, during that era, if you were overweight (as I was), there was only embarrassment, shame, and relentless teasing.
It really wouldn’t have mattered if I were Grace Kelly in the flesh–I still would have seen only the so-called flaws in my appearance. Luckily, over the years (and thousands of hours of therapy), I began to appreciate those physical quirks for what they truly are: signs of a unique individual, meant to be cherished and expressed rather than pushed under the radar.
While I’ve come to a peaceful resolution about my own physical quirks, I must admit I’m not always as freely expressive as I could be. So this week–the final week of Be the Dog’s weekly examination of dog traits!–I’ll pay extra attention to self-acceptance.
It seems an appropriate place to draw these posts to a close. After all, isn’t the final goal of our lives to achieve true self-acceptance and self-love? And isn’t life so much better once we’ve attained it?
I’ll be back next week, with something new (and I’ll still report back about this week’s challenge, of course).
Follow up to last week’s challenge: Learn to trust others more.
I actually had to take my own advice this past week, and let me tell you, it was a bitter pill to swallow.
Then again, sometimes swallowing the correct pill will help to ease our pain, right?
As someone who’s struggled with trust through my life, my trust is not only hard-earned but also fragile enough to be lost after one transgression. So it was quite the triumph for me not only to trust a friend with whom I’d lost touch when she invited me to a conversation, but also to trust that her remorse and desire to reconnect were genuine.
Suffice it to say that, after a long and heartfelt conversation, our friendship has been renewed. And that felt really good.
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Thank you for reading Be the Dog! I’ll be back next week with a final review of this past year of dog stories and musings on human nature.
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