Questioning Our Best Selves
4 minute read
After getting married, nine years ago now, we sent out the standard thank you card complete with a wedding photo on the front. ‘Thank You’, it purred in a fancy font atop a black and white depiction of myself and himself glancing tentatively at each other. Lovely Fota House stood grandly in the background and my long dress looked pretty perfect, swishing dreamily, as the snap captured us literally strolling into married life. Although our wedding photographs are already starting to look ever so slightly aged, for now they capture me somewhat at my supposed best - perfectly groomed, my hair and make-up and gown just so.
In fact, I was so very ‘just so’ that when one of my lovely neighbours received our thank you card, she promptly assumed it to be advertising and put it on the recycling heap. I will interject here to state that when I first heard this, I was weak for myself. I thought boom! - job done! I looked so good on my wedding day that I didn’t really even look like myself. Fantastic! I mean, why would I want to look like myself when I can look like someone primped enough to have perhaps made the front of a flier?
In advance of the big day itself, when all the wedding palaver had been reaching near-deafening tones of craziness, I had received some shrewd advice from my best friend - the expert, given that she had tied the knot just eight months before me and is a font of practicality. She told me to ignore the racket - those insisting that my hair be tied up, that of course I needed fake tan, as well as a full mani/pedi. She simply said; ’Strive to look like the best version of your self on the day’. And this made absolute sense to me - just amp everything up a little, tweak it here and glam it up there and hey presto - the self that would present at the alter would be my absolute and utter most fantastic self. How perfect, how attainable, how… authentic. For me, the idea of a ‘best self’ was a middle finger to beauty culture and it’s standards which were insisting I look nothing short of perfect on my big day. How liberating a best self sounded!
As a teenager in the nineties, our bread and butter was Fashion TV. Although, bread and butter is probably the wrong term to use as the beauty ideal then was all about no butter and certainly no carbs - it was super skinny, white, leggy with a good sprinkling of what we might now identify as body negativity for anyone who didn’t look like Christy Turlington. (Lord - how I longed to look like Christy Turlington).
It certainly wasn’t about one’s best self. In fact, your self didn’t come into it, because really, you just needed to look and be like other people.
Cosmopolitan told you how to achieve Cameron Diaz’s chiseled abs, Julia Roberts’ perfect smile and Cindy Crawford’s poomphy hair do. This all resulted in most girls (and perhaps many guys) feeling they lacked something - something they could never have anyway, no matter how much they dieted or how many Miss Selfridge tops they bought. They could never be good enough. So an advancement to the idea of a best self - something which was individual and unique - felt very refreshing and powerful. What’s more, improving what you already had was within everybody’s grasp. If you just made the effort - you know? Just don’t forget there are rules about what best means too.
Best, of course means thinner. Always thinner. And you could be a bit more stylish - and perhaps your hair could be better? Actually, everything could be better, couldn’t it? And that’s the one problem with your ‘best self’. She could always be flipping ‘better’ - which is exhausting in itself, but worse, that potential to always be better means it’s always in your hands. And so, while I’ll never look like Christy Turlington - I really could pop a bit of eyeliner on more often and maybe wear better jeans? While aspirational was out of reach, at least you could throw the towel in on it.
Of course I’m looking at extremes here. But it is important to point to the fact that even with a growing movement towards body positivity and a genuine celebration of difference, ‘best self’ comes with its own pressures. Beyond the realm of how you present, ‘best’ implies being fitter, perhaps doing a course while also striving for that promotion. Oh and don’t forget to be happy and fulfilled and take time to meditate and breathe… there’s an app for breathing - have you heard?
You have the power to eat better, choose more wisely, be more proactive… the list is never ending in terms of way to achieve your best self. Everything has (conveniently / annoyingly) gone online and we all have a phone - so gone is the excuse that you can’t travel to take a class or you don’t have the time. Maybe you can’t spare thirty minutes out of your day, but surely you can fit in a ten minute lifting session between reciting your mantras for the day and making a paleo-friendly lunch? According to many experts you can even ‘self heal’ all your many traumas. So it’s really no wonder more people are starting to think it’s a good idea to start the day at 5am. The effort required to be one’s best self is never-ending and saturated in the idea that you must continuously strive for better.
That is unless we take a look at how our own best selves actually look - away from the pressure of the outside world and media, deep down in our hearts and souls.
Deep, deep, deep down, my best self gets enough sleep. And rests a little during the day. And has time to enjoy a coffee and to scroll a bit on her phone (purely trivial stuff, for the total win) and to listen to a podcast and maybe create a little, be it through play or cooking or some writing. My best self eats nourishing food, feels comfortable and vitalised and energised and has a good belly laugh at least once a day. My best self gets to hang out with nice, interesting people who are interested in her. And care about her. My best self has fun and does so with abandon - she skips and squats and makes a fool of herself. She’s sometimes too much, she sometimes gets it wrong, she does her best, she tries not to regret. She wears her heart on her sleeve - she tries to live intentionally. She is always learning.
It feels like the world has somewhat kidnapped our selves in order to pull us all into a line of uniform people - which runs against the wonderful idea that ‘best self’ is at it’s core. As beings who are fundamentally tribal, it is hard to truly see our selves, but strive to see them we must as it is the only way to satiate our hearts and souls, which are full of the essence of our selves and living in alignment with our heart and soul can surely be the only path to true happiness.
When I look at my wedding photographs now, I do smile at the conformity of it all, because however different we felt we looked on our special day we really do look like any other couple of the time - maybe even an anonymous couple featured in an advertorial, as my neighbour assumed. But I don’t really mind about that. What I like now about the photographs is not how my hair looked or my earrings (I adored those earrings) or Alan’s smart suit with it’s pretty button hole - I love the glances, the smiles, the joy, the commitment, the promise they portray. The best, outward selves in the photographs have aged, but it’s the real selves - the selves behind the eyes - which jump out from the album pages. And so it would appear that our real selves on the day were in fact our best selves all along.
There’s always room for improvement - we all want to live our best life, after all. But a good start is remembering that our real self is probably already the best. And anything extra is a bonus
Laurie Morrissey, September 2022
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