Kara E. Powell - Mirror, Mirror. Reflections on Who You Are and Who Youll Become

Zondervan

Mirror, Mirror: Reflections on Who You Are and Who Youll Become

Copyright 2003 by Youth Specialties. Youth Specialties Books, 300 South Pierce Street, El Cajon, CA 92020 are published by Zondervan, 5300 Patterson Avenue SE, Grand Rapids, Ml 49530.

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ePub Edition APRIL 2010 ISBN: 978-0-310-87321-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Powell, Kara Eckmann, 1970

Mirror, mirror: reflections on who you are and who youll become / by

Kara Powell and Kendall Payne.

p. cm.

Summary: Offers information and advice, with personal anecdotes, on what girls think of themselves and why, emphasizing a faith-based perspective on self-image.

1. Teenage girlsReligious lifeJuvenile literature. 2. Teenage girlsConduct of lifeJuvenile literature. 3. Self-esteem in adolescenceReligious aspectsChristianityJuvenile literature. [1. Teenage girlsConduct of life. 2. Self-esteemReligious aspectsChristianity. 3. Christian life.] I. Payne, Kendall. II. Title.

BV4551.3.P69 2003

248.833-dc21

2003006649

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version (North American Edition). Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.

Web site addresses listed in this book were current at the time of publication. Please contact Youth Specialties via e-mail (YS@YouthSpecialties.com) to report URLs that are no longer operational and replacement URLs if available.

Edited by Rick Marschall and Jim Kochenburger

Proofreading by Anita Palmer

(Reviving Ophelia. p. 55)

If thats true, where do you stand? Are you on the stage as one of the finalists? Maybe even the one who will be crowned with her own sparkly tiara? Or perhaps you are one of the 45 contestants who got cut WAY early in the contest. Or maybe you never even made it into the contest. Youre sitting in the audienceoutside youre applauding but inside youre envying the perfect beauties parading across the red carpet in front of you.

If youre like us, its some of both. Some days we dont even like to look in the mirror. Other days we think we look OK. And on those rare days, we may even think we look pretty good. We are our own harshest judges.

Maybe thats because weve been doing it for years. Lots of years. If every day is a walking Miss America contest, weve had decades of competition. And scoring. And failing.

If you looked at us on the outside, we look pretty successful. Karas got her Ph.D. (that means shes a doctorthat also means she went through 26 grades of school). Plus shes got a great job, an awesome husband, and two of the cutest kids around. Kendalls a gifted musician with a recording contract who gets to travel extensively doing what she loves to do. Good stuff, all.

But if the camera zooms a little closer, youll see weve got some warts. Lots of them. And theyve been growing for years. Neither one of us did a very good job keeping diaries or journals, but if we could go back to when we were your age, heres what I, for instance, might say.

When I was 12, I was boyish. I was one of those tomboy types. I was tall (still am), had short hair, wasnt allowed to get my ears pierced, and wore hardly any make-up. When I went to restaurants, waitresses would often think I was a boy. I pretended that it didnt bug me. I kinda liked being a tomboy. But I wish it didnt happen so often. I wish there was more about me that looked and acted like a girl.

And I was eager. The most popular girl at our junior high school was named Kim. She was my friends friends friend, which meant she probably knew my name, but nothing else about me. I knew lots of stuff about her what radio station she listened to, who she was going out with, where she shopped, what she did for fun. Every once in a

while when wed walk past each other in the hallways, shed say, Hey. That meant THE WORLD to me. She saw that I existed. And that made me feel a little more important.

Plus I was ashamed. Junior high meant Junior high P.E. And junior high P.E. meant changing in the junior high girls locker room. For the first year of junior high, I could wear whatever I wanted for P.E. Sometimes I didnt even change. Especially not my shirt. Id wear the same shirt to class and to P.E, even in the winter when I didnt sweat too much. But in eighth grade we got a junior high dress code. I had to wear a white shirt with this dorky roadrunner on the pocket (that was our mascot really threatening to other teams, I know). That really stunk. That meant I had to change twice right before and right after P.E. Id put my back to the rest of the room, which felt like the rest of the world, and changed as quickly as I could.

Lots of stuff was new. Especially stuff about boys. I remember the first boy who asked me to dance at a junior high dance. He was Italian and cuteone of those dark and handsome types. In high school, he became a drug dealer and dropped out of school, but in junior high, he was cool. I remember what I was wearing. And I remember how I wore my hair. But what I remember most of all was that my hands were sweaty. Like dripping. (Whats funny is that even as I type this now, my hands start to sweat.) I wanted Joey to like me. He liked me enough to dance. Once. We never really talked after that.

I always felt on the outside. I remember hearing about friends birthday parties and thinking, Why didnt they invite me? After all, I had invited them to my birthday party. But I guess I was closer to them than they were to me.

My brother was the cute one in our family. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Tan. He always had a girlfriend. Girls who didnt even know him would stop and flirt with him.

I was the smart one. If you need a math problem solved, give me a call. I had school pretty well wrapped. If there was one thing I was good at, it was tests.

How I wanted to feel pretty. To feel cute. To have strange boys flirt with me like girls flirted with my brother. But that hardly ever happened.

Plus I was the friend of the pretty one. One of my best friends in high school was our Homecoming Queen senior year. I, ahemdrove the car that she rode in during the parade.

Someone once did some math and figured that if a Barbie doll was a real life woman, shed he 72 tall and have 40-22-36 measurements. Her neck would be twice as long as a normal womans. Thats a far cry from the 54 size 12, 37-29-40 average woman who lives here in America.

Walt Mueller, What You See Is What I Am, Youth Culture Today, Spring 2001, 1

Two of my other best friends were cheerleaders. And you know what that meansinstant cuteness. Dont mind meIm the tall, awkward one standing next to the popular, bubbly cheerleaders.