Delusions

My late mother was an incredible lady. She went mostly blind in one eye while still a legal minor, though I don't really know what age. 

I do know she spent some time practicing in front of a mirror to make sure both eyes tracked together so she wouldn't develop a lazy eye and LOOK obviously impaired.

Similarly, I have a son with a speech impediment that most people don't realize exists. He says "If I need to make the distinction between deaf and death, I can just use OTHER words." He likely in some sense got that attitude from his grandmother.

I watched a talk show once with Sophia Loren as the principal guest. A woman in the audience talked about what a troglodyte she felt like and how many miles apart she was from Sophia Loren.

Loren said something like "Oh, no, you are only like five pounds overweight. It wouldn't be hard to achieve a better look."

I was probably a teenager and my takeaway from that was that the primary difference between great beauties and everyone else is something in their minds more than something physical.

Just before I turned eighteen, I got romantically involved with my best friend, the future ex. At the time , he looked like something out of Revenge of the Nerds.

I didn't care. He looked good naked.

But it bothered him. So I took him shopping and got him a better haircut.

In our twenties, at least twice the mother of some friend of mine met him and went "OMG. What a good looking, well dressed man! I can see why you married him!"

He and I both laughed out loud and HE said "Oh, no, you have that backwards. I'm a good looking, well dressed man because I married her."

They say beauty is only skin deep. It's not exactly true but it captures an important truth about the illusory nature of beauty, a topic I've thought excessively much about over the course of my life for a long list of reasons.

I've been "beautiful" and I've been "fat and ugly" -- sometimes at the same time -- and I've been a child with a massive chunk of missing eyebrow that drew inquiries from total strangers wanting to know "What happened there?"

In my teens, I read a bunch of articles about doing your eyebrows and I reshaped my heavy brows to generally be more attractive and to specifically downplay that relatively large scar on my face that used to draw invasive comments from people who really had no right to know my business but felt they did merely because they could see the mark on my face proving SOMETHING happened.

(No, nothing abusive. I smacked it on the monkey bars at about age eight.)

It is perhaps foolish to mention it now, knowing it ruins the whole point of fixing it because now it's all anyone will look for -- assuming anyone reads my stupid blogs -- but in more than forty years, no one has ever again asked me about it and I strongly suspect people don't realize I'm covered in scars in places that don't get covered because people say nothing about that one and also nothing about the others.

I know: You don't believe me. I tell tall tales. My husband isn't around to verify my "anecdotal evidence" that I know how to dress people better and BESIDES if he WERE, you would assume he was lying as a PR stunt to help my career because NO ONE is THAT good, at least without you having already gotten wind of their amazing skills FIRST through more reliable channels of information than their own bragging stories.

Obviously, I am suffering from delusions of grandeur for hoping to follow in the steps of David Kibbe and help women become more comfortable in their clothes, both physically because knits don't cut off your circulation and psychologically because I want to make clothes that help YOU look YOUR best instead of selling you something you subconsciously HOPE makes you LOOK like the super model who wore it on the runway knowing in your heart of hearts that's delusional.

I want to be Sophia Loren telling you "Oh, no, honey. We aren't MILES apart. You only need a LITTLE help to look better."

And then try to give you the means to achieve it rather than leaving you standing there feeling dismissed as an envious plain girl wanting what you feel only the pretty girls get and feeling like it's perpetually out of your reach, whether because you were born ugly or are too "stupid" to be beautiful.