Growing Up: Self-Consciousness vs Self-Awareness

My teen years were pretty normal, meaning total angst and torture. There was that summer that I used my babysitting money to buy yards and yards of polyester double-knit fabric. I knew homemade wasn’t as good as store-bought, but I sewed a whole new school wardrobe, designed by yours truly. One outfit was lime green culottes with a matching v-neck vest. I wore a navy-blue blouse with one of those disco collars practically as wide as my shoulders. Explain to me why someone as horribly self-conscious as me would go to those lengths to embarrass myself even further. By then I’d already stopped wearing my cat-eye glasses. There was only so much punishment I could stand.

It was as if feeling awkward and unattractive was the law of the land. We were insecure about our hair, skin, weight, shoes, boyfriends or lack of, and the list goes on, but I’m dizzy with time travel. We thought pretty girls didn’t worry, rich girls didn’t have problems, and any other girl was luckier than we were. We were so distracted by our self-criticism that we didn’t see how beautiful we were, if you just looked past the bad haircuts. Under those bangs, we were smart and funny and so much more than we let show.

My saving grace was a strawberry roan (teens with poor self-image always have horses with special colors, never just a sorrel.) King was one of those backyard horses who were stubborn, rebellious, and hardheaded in equal parts. Or maybe that was me. It could be hard to tell us apart. There was an old photo of me leaning too far forward in the saddle, wearing cutoffs with a wave of dark hair blown over one eye. My shoulders curved around my sunken chest, knowing right then I would never be good enough. For everything else I remember about how I felt back then, I was proud to be on that horse.

Then we graduated and life happened. Some of us left for college and some of us just left. We found work, and some of us started families. Those pressures we felt as teens matured with us. There were days when our greatest potential was to mess it all up and sometimes, we did. But we pushed on in our busy lives. We withdrew into martyrdom or we acted out with false bravado. Most days we did both while doing the dishes because we were multi-taskers. We needed to lighten the load, we didn’t want to quit, but we couldn’t go on.

The best part about overthinking and self-judging as if the whole world cared was that eventually, we buckled under the weight of our own good intentions.

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” Carl R. Rogers

The changes started small. No more ironing. We cared less about our hair, not that anyone noticed. We vacuumed less and read more. We learned to say no, without an excuse, and our jobs and homes didn’t collapse into chaos. Boundaries began to replace our need to be everything, everywhere, all at once. We lifted a tiny flame of self-esteem over our heads, asking for an encore while mud-wrestling with our mental health.

After polite years of false humility and talking ourselves down, we believed passive self-loathing was not just normal but required. The world has a habit of seeing women as less than men. We didn’t make that part up but it wasn’t like anyone else was going to do the laundry. Self-love has been defined both as a basic human necessity but as a moral flaw, no different than egotism, or even narcissism. It was confusing.

But we had a place we could be us. Some of us managed to keep horses and the rest of us found our way back to them. We weren’t as young or fearless, but horses are the place we were always accepted and never judged. The truth was they liked us better this way. We settled a bit and dismissed our inner rail birds. It wasn’t easy, we had to see them out. We had to focus on what we wanted rather than over-thinking how it had always been.

The self-consciousness worries took up precious time and got in the way. Horses require us to have self-awareness. We need to pay attention to the environment, what our bodies are saying, most of all, we listen more, rather than chatter on. Soon, we fell in love with the earth all over again. Only too aware that the our mental attitude impacted our horses, we wanted to be our best selves around them. Slowly, we become our best selves.

We’ve outgrown shame, and we let go of past regrets a bit more every day. We do it for horses and for our sanity. We aren’t perfect, no surprise there, but that hasn’t mattered for a while. Our mistakes are honest and we learn from them. We have become almost as wise as donkeys.

As for my sewing, I pretty much gave it up. The world is probably safe from my lime green culottes. But I have hidden skills and you can’t always buy what you need off the rack.

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