Day 2 - Be The Change!

So the week after I decided to create No Makeup May I was asked to do a presentation to 40 of my co-workers.  Awesome!  I love speaking in public! When's the meeting?  May 2nd......May 2nd?  Really?  Really!  And these are our field guys right?  GUYS?  Oh well, time to put my money where my mouth is!

The thing I realized was, when I was doing my thang, focusing on what I was there to do, there wasn't room to think about how I looked.  I became focused on what I wanted to communicate to the world and not whether my hair was perfect.

But the lesson I want to share from today is the frustration I feel when I hear "Things will never change".  Wow, really?!?!

I've heard this a few times including today, "You can't change things, it's too big, people will always think that way".  The person with which I was having this conversation, a woman, no less, explained how she got hired for a job, not because she was competent but because, and the employer actually told her this, she looked better.  And she agrees with it!  "It's just the way life is".

Then I think of all the people who refused to accept status quo and turned entire nations around!   I know it's extreme to compare this to what Martin Luther King Jr.,  Rosa Parks or Ghandi accomplished  but then I think of the young girls who are literally starving themselves to death in order to look like the women they see in magazines  and the women who have permanently scarred and disfigured themselves to stop aging or get that pouty look and I think, yeah, this is important!

You may argue, however, that these women have a choice to do that to themselves.  Yes, I agree.  No one is withholding food from anorexics and no one is forcing a 40 year old to go under the knife, but I will argue that if you watch TV for just 2 hours you will see the bombardment of ads pushing products designed to make us fit into some ideal - lose weight, get healthy glowing hair, whiter teeth, full plump long luscious lashes and on and on and on.  

Which is why, for just one month, I refuse to believe that we can't change things.  500 years ago people looked at a size 13 pale skinned woman and thought - that is beauty.   Almost 100 years ago society praised the boyish thin figure of a flapper girl.  Did bodies change or is it the lens through which we judge beauty?  I vote the latter and as long as I believe things can change I will do all that is in me to, as Ghandi said, be the change I so want for this world.  For the sake of all the beautiful girls who abandon their dreams of becoming lawyers, doctors, senators, mothers, in order to be "beautiful".  I don't want to have to suit up my currently non-existent daughter in the armour so she doesn't succumb to societal pressure, I want to create a world where who she is valued in front of what she looks like.

Even the smallest pebble can send ripples across an ocean.