‘Sign up for my 30-day programme to get fit and lean!’ ‘Bee pollen helps with a natural increase in breast size’ ‘Celery juice was a game changer for me, it cleared up my skin and helped me lose weight.’ From my adolescent years up until now, I would never afford myself an extended period of the fifty ways I wanted to change my appearance. If my mind had gone too far, the uncertainty of what I would do, and who I would become is an ingrained fear I wish not to explore. In this season of waiting over the past two weeks, it became clear I had more unresolved personal problems than I had realized. In the week my mother had left to visit my sister, my mind went elsewhere. An aberration and historical repeat of poor decision-making including breaking no-contact, binging on deep-fried foods and utter feelings of disgust with my appearance that looking at the mirror became difficult. When I was a child, I watched Snow White and pondered throughout the years how the Evil Queen had been so subsumed with a conceit that she possessed the desire to remain the fairest of them all.  This meant going so far as poisoning someone. How can one be filled with such vanity? 

Ecclesiastes describes this poignantly: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ The implication is everything is futile and short-lived as the world continues to turn, and the sun rises and sets as before. Thus, men cannot alter things in any meaningful way. In the same manner, this extends not only to things done in vain but the vanity of appearance itself. Proverbs 31:30 asserts ‘…beauty is fleeting; but the woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.’ I’d never thought I could relate to the Evil Queen up until the last few months when all I did, and all I sought was beauty in every aspect except my heart. Those years of dieting never proved useful until I had finally gotten down to a weight deemed desirable. I hadn’t realized I was losing weight until my mother came to visit in September and started worrying about me. It hadn’t presented itself alarming that I had stopped eating regularly because I was severely throwing myself into an emotional rollercoaster in a relationship doomed from the start. As one who struggled with addiction in the past, the confidence that initially stemmed from the weight loss quickly turned into obsession. I started caring more about what I wore, paying more attention to how much I ate, and how much I worked out. The taste of obsession from my adolescence kept my mind unknowingly occupied specifically over the past months and traces back to the thought that went, ‘If you became prettier and took nicer pictures to post online, he’ll regret everything and go back to you.’  

The fear of losing control, made me lose control. I lost control of my judgment, my priority of developing an intimate relationship with God, and my desire to focus on heavenly matters (not checking the weather to see if it would be a good day to take pictures for my ex to see.)  The constant chasing and the feeling of inadequacy in this culture of comparison becomes intoxicating to the point that you’re exhausted. So, I cried. I cried after my mother and I had a squabble because the pictures she took of me at the park in an outfit I meticulously planned, in a hair I washed and styled, and in new makeup I applied turned out horrible. We had a heavy meal at a sushi restaurant and walked to St James to digest our food. It seemed the perfect opportunity to take pictures, so my mom helped. I increasingly got annoyed as the more pictures she took, the worse they looked. My gut was sticking out, my hair wasn’t right, and the lighting was bad. In the end, I gave up. On the way home, my mother said ‘perfectionism is an evil spirit. Your sister used to be that way. I can’t imagine you with a partner who can tolerate this kind of behaviour.’ I kept quiet. When we got home, I expected nothing but a further lecture. Surprisingly, she apologized. She looked at me in a way that went, ‘I know.’ Owing to our complicated relationship, she knew those pictures did not provoke a mere temporary feeling of sadness, but a deep-rooted plethora of hatred towards oneself. Especially in this season of waiting and uncertainty, if one has at least one thing good going for them in a day, it’s sufficient to keep them from flinging themselves off a building. Yes, this also means stooping shallower than the Kardashians that if I got some good pictures of myself that day, I felt okay. This brings us to the point of this rant, ‘Who are we doing these for – the world, or God?’ Or even if it is for God, is it really what He wants and cares about? Isn’t such a question rendered meaningless as King Solomon states in Ecclesiastes?