Too Tight To Breathe?

Ah, here we go, sucking it in.

Scarlett O’Hara, the legendary fictional character has been where most of us girls have gone, at one time or another. Although we’re probably not grabbing onto a bedpost for dear life, like she is here, trying to squeeze into an article of clothing, it’s still the same concept. We’re gonna “suffer” for beauty’s sake.

So, that may mean, weighing, measuring- ourselves and our food- dieting, exercising, getting girlfriends’ help to shove us into some specific form or size.

Has it been too tight for you to breathe lately? Have you given yourself “permission” to be? To be the real you? As is? Right now? Can you and I breathe as ourselves, right where we are?

The fact is, a certain “beauty” look pales against the real us, anyway. Most of us, who’ve shimmied into some big event dress: prom, wedding, “sweet sixteen” have encountered some discomfort, paying the price to be beautiful. And why? Usually, it’s to win someone else’s opinion. Check out this blurb about 1800’s corsets. Sound familiar? We may not have wriggled into a corset lately, but how about some “skinny jeans? A swimsuit, maybe?

“…The corset sculpted solid flesh and enabled the plump and rosy to transform into the popular romantic ideals of fragility and delicacy. Victorian women were trying to attract Victorian men, who prized the hourglass figure which few women naturally possess: the up-thrust breasts and rounded hips divided by a tiny circular waist which made them seem both bountiful and childlike, sexual and virginal, and above all controllable, as is suggested by the fetishistic ‘hand span’ waist… Today’s ideal female body - thin, toned, and narrow hipped, with big breasts, is as unlikely to be produced by nature as an hourglass figure with a hand span waist.”

-Theatre Designer/Wardrobe Mistress Amy Broatch, author of “Courtesan”

I’ve talked about one of my favorite scriptures before: “Consider the Lilies,” found in Matthew 6:28-30.

“And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”

We’re all to breathe and be ourselves, to fulfill our God-given destiny, not some constricting, impossible piece of clothing. So, how about as step one, we breathe as our real selves?