Self Confidence

Is that the way you look?

Welcome one and all to Crone Life, my newsletter about getting older and dealing with it. I’m currently on a leave of absence from my job, post shoulder-replacement surgery. I’m a former Brooklynite who moved to the mid-Hudson Valley 8 years ago.

I look OK, right?

Today I’m thinking about self-presentation and appearance. Partly this is because I am going back to work next week and I’m kind of concerned because I can’t groom myself properly–I can only brush or comb one side of my head, I can’t raise my right arm high enough to get deodorant in my armpit, I can’t wear a normal bra so I’m wearing cheap sports bras that are comfortable but have foam liners that shape my breasts into unnatural and often lopsided hemispheres. Of course, the truth is my coworkers don’t care about that. It’s summer, there’s nobody around, my supervisor is retiring in mid-July, they will just be happy to have me there.

Worrying about how you look affects everyone. You can’t always tell. You could run into a person who looks deeply depressed and suicidal to you, and find out they are wearing their favorite outfit and feel beautiful. Others might look amazing to you but hate what they see in the mirror. I’ve always wanted to be someone who literally did not care how they looked, but it’s tough. Maybe I just wanted to feel like I didn’t have to care what I looked like because it meant I always looked good.¹

Hating the way you look can be due to a number of factors, mostly mental and emotional. It has little to do with how you actually look. It’s more about how you feel about yourself. There are different ways of characterizing “looking good” too. Do you look good because you seem marketable? Do you look good because you feel happy? Are feeling happy and feeling marketable the same thing? Are being happy and being marketable the same? And by “marketable” I think I mean “worth the most in the marketplace”--attractive, healthy, not too weird, just individual enough to be memorable. I guess? That’s what I think it means anyway, with the addition of “good at self-promotion.” If you’re happy, are you more or less marketable? I could go on, but I feel like I’m spiraling.

Let me start over. Most people don’t feel confident about their personal appeal. Everyone wants positive feedback for their efforts to engage. Even famous people who seem to love themselves–our current President, say, or the new Mrs. Bezos–probably don’t, really. They may not be in the limelight agonizing about how unloveable they are, but deep down, that drives a lot of their behavior. This doesn’t mean you should feel sorry for them or cut them any slack. The Bible says you should love your neighbor as you love yourself. If you are treating your neighbor badly, what does that mean about how you view yourself? And yet, in our culture, being mean and callous, not having to care, is somehow seen as a sign of strength. It’s tough to disentangle your worldview from that framework.

Last year, I wrote about feeling like my “personal brand” wasn’t consistent and thinking this was a liability in terms of constructing a personality as a successful Substack writer.

I felt I needed to be more consistent in order to appeal to readers and subscribers. If people are going to follow you, they want to know who they’re going to get. The trick is to figure out how to be the same yet different every time so people don’t get bored. ²

I still do zigzag all over the place, though I’ve tried to keep some elements consistent. I have certain topics I return to and I almost always include a photo of my adorable cat. I think the other recurring elements are that I’m smart, I’m funny, and I am not mean. A little acerbic, maybe, but not mean.

Creating an appealing personality (online or off) can take different forms. I’ve been following the rise of @justbeingmelani (Melani Sanders) on Instagram (she also has a Tiktok and a page of reels on Facebook) as she's been developing and perfecting her very funny “We Do Not Care (WDNC) Club for Perimenopausal and Menopausal Women.” I saw a recent Reel from her a few weeks ago and liked it so much I hunted through her account till I found the first one. In that one, she’s a little embarrassed, but defiant. Underneath, she’s also raw and vulnerable. As she keeps making the reels, she starts to develop a comedic character–she is the president of the club, wearing three different pairs of glasses at once, secure in her neck pillow, wielding her legal pad and her highlighter with confidence and delivering hilarious deadpan one liners. You don’t like her unshaven legs? Legs is legs. Be glad you can walk.³

Melani got written up in the NY Times last week and I made the mistake of reading the comments, which were a mix of middle-aged women gleefully announcing they no longer care either, men a) saying they would divorce their wives if they stopped caring about how they look or b) men indignant that there was any woman out there who was not totally focussed on making themselves look good for them. Sprinkled in were commenters (mostly women, I think) who were outraged that any woman would think of letting herself go like that, and others who got very excited about “standards.” General attitudes about a woman’s appearance, in other words.

Caring about how you look is a shortcut to control (or the hope of control) for many, many people. You might think it’s vanity, or call it vanity in others, but, especially for women, your looks are often all you can be in control of. For “looks” you might substitute “job performance” or “getting good grades,” but what it all comes down to is being a pleasure to have in class. You’ll do anything you can to get that gold star. Joining Melani’s club and not caring frees you to be your comfortable self.

And yet. AND YET. It doesn’t feel ok not to care until someone else gives you permission. It’s hard to liberate yourself. I was in a therapy group in the 90s and one thing I was always working on was my imposter syndrome issues. I wanted to quit my full-time job and became a freelance writer, but I could not make the leap. The lead therapist had me create a list of affirmations and then told me to repeat them aloud and I couldn’t do it. I would cry, I would gag, I would say I had to leave the room. But the group encouraged me to read out each one. Then they would repeat it, until I got to the end of the list and was in the center of a circle of women chanting positive statements about me. Slowly my violent anxiety reaction wore off. After a while I could repeat those affirmations to myself without feeling I was going to die. And thus my writing career took shape.⁴

I don’t know if other people have the same confidence issues. I’m pretty sure the former Lauren Sánchez doesn't. Maybe we should take her as a role model. But I prefer Melani.

News from Veronica!

Veronica protecting her soft, furry tummy

She continues to enjoy spending the night outside. Then she spends the day sleeping. I miss her cuddling up with us at bedtime, but I do get to nap with her in the afternoon. We have resumed our summer evening custom of sitting on the deck (when it’s not raining) and listening to the birds chirp, watching the sky for bats, and waiting for the fireflies to appear. She always joins us, lounging on the deck railing. Last Saturday, my husband pointed out that I should be gentler with her and only touch her the way she wants to be touched. That means No Tummy. I have been trying to stick to that and I think our relationship has improved.

Hey everybody, thanks for reading! I hope you love yourself and can throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care and mean it. Please share a little love with me and click that heart to show it. Leave a comment, too!

1. Somehow, that’s logical.

2. Familiar but fun!

3. This is not an exact quote, I don’t think, but I did my best.

4. I’m a little embarrassed about how Stuart Smalley this sounds. But only a little.