I look like a man
In 2017, I did a TEDx talk as part of an international synthetic biology competition for students. I'd been picked as one of our project speakers for the Giant Jamboree in Boston, and the TEDx presentation was my chance to practise on a smaller stage first. It was a huge personal milestone, given how insecure I was back then and how hard I'd been trying to make public speaking feel less terrifying.
I was reorganising my LinkedIn recently and opened the old video again.
One comment.
It said I looked like a man.
Had I read that five years ago, when it was posted, I wouldn't have taken it very well, to say the least. I've never been the most feminine of women (broad shoulders, short hair, a tiny chest), and I never felt pretty, or "how a girl was supposed to be." I also picked, in hindsight, the worst possible outfit for that stage: a sleeveless, fitted top that emphasised all the wrong features. (If there was a fashion police, I'd be locked up for life.)
When I read the comment now, nothing happened.
No sadness.
No humiliation.
No questioning my worth.
I still have the same build, broad shoulders and all. I still have a short haircut (if anything I've gone shorter). My fashion sense is still very much an undeveloped skill. So it is quite possible I (still) look like a man. (I actually recently joked to a friend that my moustache is coming in nicely, because I had been too lazy to pluck my lip.)
But the funny thing is, I no longer care whether the comment is true or false. Because despite what my past self unconsciously believed, either way it doesn’t make me a better or worse human being. It doesn’t affect my worth. And more to the point, that comment was never really about me. Comments like that get typed to make the commenter feel better about themselves. Which means it says a lot more about whoever wrote it than it ever said about little old me on stage.
My past self would have been emotionally reeling after reading that comment. Reposting it, actively, for more people to see? Unfathomable. But I think this is exactly what people now need to hear.
We're handed so much external pressure about what we should look like, what we should achieve, how we should dress, speak and behave. We build an internal picture out of all of it, a picture we then spend our lives measuring ourselves against and never quite matching. No wonder I had no self-esteem. No wonder so many of us are burning ourselves out chasing perfection.
The sad part is how unnecessary it is. A lot of that pressure exists because someone is trying to sell you something, or projecting their own insecurities. But a product will always leave you still falling short of the picture in your head, and others’ insecurities are not your problem.
I don't want to pretend I never doubt myself or my appearance anymore. I still do. But I've stopped letting that doubt decide whether I could do the things I care about. When I catch myself comparing against some mental picture-perfect version of Kelly, I try to let her go. This is the Kelly the world actually got, and my worth doesn’t hinge on other people’s opinions.
I set my own values. As long as I'm living by those, I reckon I'm doing pretty damn well.
Yours in mind-bending,
Kelly
P.S. What opinion, snarky comment or internal picture are you letting determine your value? Is that fair to the wonderful person you are?
