Why are so many women haunted by a fear of not being good enough?
By top author JANE GREEN, who finally conquered her own sense of insecurity – and says that if she can, anyone can
ACOUPLE of years ago, I was invited to be the guest speaker at an event to raise money, and awareness, for breast cancer. Although I have never had breast cancer, once upon a time I lost one of my dearest friends to the cruel disease.
She was 43 when her life ended too early, leaving a husband and two small children. She had asked me to write a book about her experience, which became my novel The Love Verb.
The event was held in one of those glamorous New York apartments you see in the movies.
The lift doors opened into the apartment’s foyer, where scores of women stood around sipping champagne cocktails, beautifully dressed in tight, floral mini-dresses, all the better to see their yoga-honed bodies, their Hermes Birkin bags hanging like exquisite jewels from their elegant wrists. I walked out of the lift, resisting the urge to turn tail and run home.
A few women looked over to see who had arrived, sweeping me up and down with their eyes and deciding I wasn’t worthy, before turning back to their friends.
At least, that was how it felt. I had got my outfit wrong. I didn’t fit in. In my now-creased linen trousers and silky T- shirt, what had looked like relaxed chic in my bedroom mirror now looked anything but.
Everything about these women intimidated me. One look from them and I felt, instantly, the way I have felt all my life: inadequate.
I stood alone during the cocktail hour, attempting to blend in with the wallpaper, pretending to be busy on my iPhone. If I smiled at someone, they looked away. I didn’t belong. They knew it, and I knew it.
And then the room quietened and I was introduced. I walked to the front of the vast living room. Rented chairs, the kind you see at expensive weddings, were arranged in row after row, the audience turning their heads to wave hello at friends and acquaintances in other rows.
I started to talk about my book. I talked about my friend, Heidi. I spoke of the lessons I had learned in losing someone I loved — namely, that love is a verb; that it isn’t enough to tell the people we love that we love them, but that real love requires acts of love, such as dropping off food or sending a thoughtful email.
I learned that love is in the doing, not in the saying. I learned that love requires effort.
I told the story of how Heidi said she would leave white feathers in unexpected places, to show me she was still there, watching over me.
My first white feather appeared at her memorial service. I was exhausted from sobbing, and made my way to the bathroom to wipe the smudged mascara from my eyes.
Walking into the grey-tiled room, I blinked. Several feet in front of me, on the floor, was a white feather.
The next came a little while later. My husband and I were driving Heidi’s ten-year-old daughter back home. The car roof was off and she giggled as the wind whipped through her long hair, covering her face.
I laughed with her, before noticing there was a perfect white feather on her jacket. WHILE
I told my stories, the room in that expensive New York apartment fell completely silent. I had planned on leaving as quickly as possible after my talk, but I couldn’t get out of there. A stampede of women quickly approached, throwing their arms around me, and as tears streamed down their cheeks they shared their own stories — and every one of them had one.
Whether it was losing a mother, a friend, a sister, or sharing how they had found their own white feathers — the women showed me real warmth and love. They were not the women I’d thought they were at all.
I was embarrassed at how wrong I had been in judging their outsides by my insides. I hadn’t given them a chance because of my own lack of self-worth. Not that you would know it to look at me either.
For years I had hidden behind a wall of glamour, trying to be someone I wasn’t. I was terrified that someone might see beyond the best- selling author to the painfully shy, overweight, frizzy-haired girl that I still saw in the mirror. Brené Brown, a writer and research professor at the University of Houston, says: ‘Shame is the most powerful emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.
‘ Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.’ SHAME,
I began to realise, is what makes us try on other personas in an attempt to hide our true selves. We cover our inadequacies by armouring up. If we have the right outsides, no one will see how insufficient our insides may be, but we will never be able to connect properly.
We are so busy hiding, so convinced that we don’t fit in, we won’t dare be vulnerable, human or reveal our faults — all of which leads to a very lonely life. I was that person, trying very hard to be someone I wasn’t.
I was reminded of how universal this feeling is among women when I heard the actress Olivia Colman at the Golden Globes last month saying she felt as though she was winning someone else’s award, when she was given the gong for Best Actress in a TV series [The Crown].
Where I now live, a small coastal town near New York where you can never be too rich or too thin, it didn’t matter how many best-selling novels I had written: I never felt pretty enough or successful enough.
I straightened my hair and sported glittery bling. I had blonde highlights and dressed in 50 shades of ‘greige’, attempting to fit in. And I found myself growing lonelier and lonelier.
I had friends in my town, but they were mostly situational friends rather than friends with whom I had a deep connection.
Eighteen months ago, I turned 50 and took stock. I didn’t want to keep pretending — it was time to discover who I really was. I had spent so long hiding my true self that I didn’t know.
I started experimenting with my world. I had never been much of a drinker, but it turns out that I love tequila. I threw out the greige and started wearing colours; bright red and emerald green. I bought kaftans and giant earrings.
Foolishly, I had always been too self-conscious to dance. At weddings, my husband would throw himself into it, waving his hands in the air as I shuffled gamely from side to side, counting the minutes until I could get off the dance floor.
At my 50th birthday party, with a little too much of my new favourite tipple, I discovered I love dancing. I haven’t stopped since.
A few months ago, for fun, I dyed my hair pink. It was supposed to be
temporary, but as soon as I saw my reflection, I knew I could never go back to being blonde or, worse, my natural salt and pepper. It felt even more like me.
Then, the British artist Grayson Perry came over to interview me for his forthcoming TV series about America. I had never met him before, and fell instantly in love.
He wasn’t wearing a dress but he did ride up my driveway on a multi- coloured Harley Davidson with a tooled yellow leather seat that I have been lusting after ever since.
We went for a bike ride together by the beach, Grayson on his Harley, me riding my hot pink Little Free Library bicycle — I fill it with books every weekend and cycle to the local beach to hand them out to people.
Every passer-by slowed down to stare, some with their mouths visibly agape. They had never seen anything like the pair of us. I thought we were a perfect match, me with my pink hair and he with his colourful everything.
What I loved most was seeing how comfortable Grayson was with not fitting in — how easy he feels in his own skin and in expressing himself in ways that are unlike anyone else. Channelling Grayson, I have given up worrying about fitting in. I no longer hide in a corner at parties, pretending to be busy on my phone.
Nowadays, if I walk into a room where I don’t know anyone, I will introduce myself with a warm smile and ask questions.
Occasionally people are uninterested, but it is amazing how a warm smile can soften the hardest of personalities. Or perhaps it’s the pink hair.
The best part of discovering who I really am has been the new friendships I have made.
I am very aware that the only reason I have allowed myself to develop these connections with people is because I am no longer hiding behind a veneer of the woman I thought I had to be.
HOWEVER, I sometimes still slip back into bad habits. Two weeks ago, I found myself having tea with a young woman I had seen only via her social media account. She is part of a pack I refer to as the ‘Yummy Mummies’.
A decade younger than me, she is petite, gym-honed and beautiful, with a large Instagram following.
We met, unexpectedly, at a coffee morning. As soon as she spoke, I knew that I liked her and by the end of that coffee morning we found ourselves sequestered in the corner of the room, where she revealed some of the struggles she had been going through. Her husband had recently lost his job and they were struggling to pay the mortgage on their home and keep up her Instagram lifestyle.
Her life looked perfect on the outside, but scratch the surface and she was the same as all of us, with the same fears and worries, the same struggles.
I wanted to tell her to reveal some of what she is going through — that more people would relate to her being scared than to her being perfect — but I thought again.
This wasn’t her lesson to learn, it was my lesson. My reminder not to judge other people by their Instagram accounts or what they look like.
Maybe one day she will reveal her truths. Maybe one day Instagram will be filled with people living in messy houses, with teenagers’ shoes all over the hallway.
But until then I shall continue to drink tequila, dye my hair pink and dance as though no one is watching. And even if they are, I no longer care.