Until you get comfortable in your own skin life can be difficult, or for some people, hell. Why had I stopping growing at the ridiculous height of 5ft 5 and a half? (don’t forget the half!) I rather enjoyed playing rugby but my chances of surviving on a rugby pitch were next to none. The answer of course was very simple. It was in my genes. My father was only 5ft 4 and my mother quite short too. So why I should have imagined I would grow into a 6ft giant is hard to comprehend. Most of us go through a stage of being overly self-conscious about our appearance and it can be a cause of/contribute to poor mental health.
There was a point in my life when I decided that this is what I had got, so I had better get on with it and do the best I could with what I had. I won’t say I never looked back. Starting new roles brought new doubts. When I started in a Solicitors office, I compared myself with others around me who seemed more knowledgeable, intelligent, more worldly wise and frankly better at doing the job. How could I ever compare with them? I was doomed to second rate life and doubted my ability to succeed. Or so I felt in my worst moments.
When I look around the 276 staff in our offices, we are so fortunate with our very diverse bunch of individuals. We are all different and none of us has yet reached perfection. Some of us are very good at some aspects of what is required and less good at others. If we help support one another and work as a team then the sky is the limit as they say; and we all have so much to learn and someone in the team spending time with us to help us develop is worth is weight in gold.
Yet many of us still harbour doubts about our appearance, our image, our ability and how we can live up to the supposed standards that we think others are imposing on us. In fact the people who we think are concentrating on our supposed faults, actually have as many doubts and difficulties as we do. These ideas of the perfect image, the perfect lawyer, the perfect employee can be very damaging to individual well-being and indeed personal mental health. As I suggested before, the very fact of our diversity is our strength yet if we assume that everyone rolls into work each day full of happiness and self-confidence we are deluding ourselves. That isn’t the way life works and employers should understand that and adjust what they do.
In our practice, we have trained up a cohort of mental health first aiders. I am not one of them so I am not entirely sure what training they have had. However I am sure that this acknowledgement that mental health and physical well-being have equal importance must be right. This week is Mental Health Awareness week and this year we are being asked to focus on body image which I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. There is no perfect body shape or image yet we are hostages to images of supposed perfection which are thrown at us constantly by media and society.
Just like my own self-doubt in early years about how I looked and what people thought about my image, many are plagued more seriously by their worry about how others view them. This concentration upon our self-image can be very damaging indeed. I was fortunate to be bolshie enough to stop caring. I was who I was and everyone else had better get on with it. But it is not always easy to move to this mind set and we are all very different in the way we develop in our journey through life.
This media myth of a supposed perfect image of human beings is a falsehood that we need to cast out. It leads to untold harm if we start to buy into it as truth. The real important Royal story last year was not of the birth of Archie but the Royal’s support for the mental health text support service Shout. We have a long way to go before we crack these problems. At last society does seem to be beginning to mobilise against increasing mental health issues in a media dominated world.