THE BARBIE DOLL COMPLEX

Sitting in front of a quiet stream indolently passing through a green grove, uncaring and lucid, at times burnished with the rays of the Sun and at other times dull, sometimes bubbling with the excitement of the prospects ahead and at other times nonchalant, have you often wanted the stream to have been broader or more slender, more shiny or more flat, quieter or noisier or neon green or hot pink in colour?

When you gazed at the stars on a clear summer night, some twinkling and the others just existing, have you wanted the stars to be any bigger or smaller or anything but what they are? When you’ve shivered from the sheer beauty of the serene ranges, the unpredictable valleys and the all-pervading snow on the mountains, have you thought of how the snow should have been whiter or the mountains more high or low. Have you ever been disgusted by the vast expanse of the seas and their utter might and wanted the waves to splash in a different manner and the sea to make less of a roaring noise and probably be some other colour? Have you? Have you ever?

If you have, then God help you!

And if you haven’t then may be, just may be, I might be able to help you.

When you wander by the stream, gaze at the stars, hike up the mountains or lie by the sea you admire them, you soak in their beauty. You don’t think of varying them. You haven’t. You have never thought of it because you are not conditioned to think like that, you were never taught to think like that and in some divine way you were not born to think like that.  You were taught to admire nature just the way she is, not change her, and not want to have her any other way. Regrettably, a lesson as basic as that, that you probably learnt in your mother’s womb and that you practice every living moment, you forgot to practice when you stood in front of the mirror.

When and whenever you looked in the mirror, you judged and judged the woman staring back at you, each time taking away a tiny bit of you inside. Each time you looked in the mirror you craved a person either fairer or slimmer or more curvaceous; you wanted a thinner nose or a different set of cheekbones, blue eyes or green eyes or more hair or less hair or more mass or less mass; you wanted something, anything but what you saw.

For all your brave front before the world and all the combats you survived, every night when you got home, stripped of your make up and your masks, undressed and uncovered, stark naked in front of the mirror, every night you lost a battle, a war, that you have probably raged against yourself since the day you looked into the mirror. Every night you go to bed wishing you were someone else or at the very least looked like someone else.

All the time you admired the stream, the stars, the mountains and the seas you did not perceive a little bit of you in each of them nor did anyone else come to your rescue but all those precious years as a child you naively kept searching for yourself in a Barbie Doll or other such callous and cruel projection of what the society wanted you to look like. And I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you because the day you were given that Barbie Doll in your hand, albeit unknowingly and unaware, you lost your first battle then. Somewhere down the years and many such brutal projections later, defeat seems like a part of you; a part that keeps you from liking yourself and being what nature made you to be.

You don’t look like a Barbie Doll; you don’t look like any doll. You can’t. You were not meant to. You are a living, breathing woman who looks like what nature intended you to look like, complete with less mass or more mass or less melanin or more melanin, more curves or less curves or no curves. You cannot ever look like what a corporate house thought young women should look like way back in 1959 and made millions out of it. I don’t blame them either. You and I gave those millions away to them along with some or a lot of our self esteem. You also cannot look like the other women. If that was the game plan we could have had clones instead of individuals. An unrealistic body image slowly and steadily gnaws at your strength and your beauty until one day you are unhappy and dead.

And I won’t be able to help you and nor will anyone else until you let go off your Barbie Doll, forget it like it was a bad dream and start your life afresh. You will have to unburden all your discontentment and insecurities, flush out your hideous notions and your masks and make up, annihilate yours and the society’s unrealistic and ugly projection of what you should look like and look into the mirror. And keep looking. Keep looking and keep staring until you fall in love with the woman staring back at you. You were not meant to change her. You were not meant to look like anything or anyone else but her. The little girl who played her childhood away was too vulnerable to see the monster lurking within the harmless looking dolls. But you are a mighty strong woman; stop playing with the little girl in you.