YOU'RE SO VAIN

Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash

YOU’RE SO VAIN

When I was a child of seven, I stopped at an oval mirror hanging on the bathroom wall and stared at my reflection. It made me smile. I saw my shining eyes, my soft skin and an aura of light around my face. I ran into the kitchen and told my mother proudly, “I’m beautiful.”

“Don't be vain,” was her response.

It’s ironic that I went on to become a professional ballerina, a career that required me to stare into a mirror all day long and constantly evaluate how I looked. It also required me to stare at my face in a mirror in the dressing room for a good hour before every performance as I applied the extreme makeup that made me look like a beautiful exotic creature, complete with sparkling earrings and tiara, who danced lightly on the tips of her toes.

Some fifty years after I hung up my pointe shoes, I reunited with a member of my ballet company, Dennis, with whom I’d had a brief affair. When he knocked on the door, I opened it eagerly. Although we were so much older and our bodies had changed, I could still see the brightness in his eyes. I smiled broadly, it was so good to see him again, but the first words out of his mouth were, “You used to be so beautiful.”

“So were you,” I retorted, something I never would have said if his words hadn't stung.

“I lost my butt,” was the next thing he said. He was doing it to both of us. When I looked closely, he was painfully thin, his skin was wizened and he was dragging an oxygen tank behind him, the result of smoking cigarettes since he was twelve. I had initially seen his light but now all I could see were his imperfections. “C’mon in,” I said, trying to regain my equilibrium after the double edged compliment he had dished out.

What is more beautiful than a seasoned athlete’s body with defined muscles, a flat, six pack stomach and unstoppable energy? That was Dennis in his past, but like everything and everyone else, it didn’t last. As he and I sat in my living room and reminisced, I saw how fleeting the illusion of perfect beauty is, how so much of it is a reflection of our inner perception. A friend told me that for a short time, he had been with a woman in her fifties whom he thought was beautiful – until one day, she looked at herself, naked, in a full length mirror and said out loud, “I hate my body.” From then on, so did he. His story helped me understand that the way we see ourselves determines how other people see us.

Aging has a way of humbling us, urging us to look beyond appearances and feel someone’s spirit, or our own, from the inside out. As I get older and my appearance is changing, I don't look look like I used to. Why should I? Why do people like to say that fifty is the new forty? Why can’t fifty look like fifty? Why can't we look like the age that we are and find the beauty in it? Someone told me that when he saw himself in the mirror on his sixtieth birthday, he felt shame. That shouldn’t have to happen. Looking our age is just as valid at sixty as it is at six. Children don't feel embarrassed to look young. Why should we be embarrassed to look old? It’s all part of the human condition, something we can't change. We can get plastic surgery, use fillers and get liposuction to look younger and slimmer but whatever we do, we won't look the way we used to and we will keep on getting older. There is simply no way to stop it.

While getting older brings with it some physical trials, it also gifts us with spiritual maturity, peace and compassion if we do the work to embrace ourselves right where we are. In the Buddhist philosophy, respecting aging at every stage is the greatest kindness we can offer ourselves and the ones we love. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama says that if our mind is trained to accept the reality of impermanence, the physical suffering that comes with old age won't disturb us as much. He says that getting older has its own beauty as it gives us the opportunity to share our depth of experience with other people.

There is a fine line between vanity and self-appreciation, between obsessing about yourself and seeing everyone as worthy of love and kindness. I fight my early programming by taking what my mother called vanity and flip it into appreciation. I use it as a spiritual practice, trying to see myself, not like I was, but as I am today. I try not to measure younger Andrea with older Andrea. I try to care more about compassion than physical beauty, more about healing than being invincible. I had the privilege to write a memoir with Olivia Newton John who told me that she wanted to be remembered, not for her voice or her acting abilities but rather for her kindness. She got her wish. She was one of the gentlest, kindest people I ever met and that’s how everyone remembers her.

An old acting friend, Chuck, went to visit a relative who was in a mental health facility. It seemed that his cousin thought he was God, that he was more powerful than anyone else and in control of the Universe. Chuck hung out with him for a while and then he said, “I see that you think you’re God. I get it. You and I are similar except for one small difference – I think I’m God just like you do, but I think everyone else is, too.”

When you think you’re better than someone else, it’s lonely out there. When you think someone else is better than you, that’s lonely too. But when you see yourself walking beside your friends instead of in front of or in back of them, when you don’t compare yourself with how you used to look or how anyone else looks, you feel connected and supported and the world becomes a gentler place.