I knew
a young girl once who rather graciously--and completely
inadvertently--provided me with a wonderful illustration of the power of
vanity. When I first met her when she was in fifth grade, she had no vanity to speak of. She was still a kid
and she enjoyed things; she didn't care at all about things like clothing
brand names or whether she was seen wearing certain jackets. She
wore what she liked, and she didn't worry about what other people liked or
didn't.
Unfortunately
for her (and her parents), that all changed when she hit middle school.
She became so caught up in what she was wearing and how she looked that
she caused herself many miserable moments and hours, and caused those around her a great deal of frustration and annoyance.
If she got a new shirt, it had to be a certain brand name or she moped
around for hours sometimes. She deliberately disobeyed her mother's
order to wear a heavy winter coat on a day when the temperature was below zero, because it
was somehow not cool to be wearing a heavy coat--she wanted to wear her
windbreaker. She was willing to risk getting sick and to be
extremely uncomfortable just because of what she thought her friends would
think of her.
Just two years
earlier, she had been very outspoken in criticizing the older girls who were doing
exactly what she was doing then.
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Don't
get me wrong--she was a great kid, with many wonderful traits. But her
vanity got in the way of her relationships with others, and at
times it was very difficult to be with her.
Even the way she talked changed--she was more willing to use words like "geek" and
"nerd" to describe people who didn't dress as "cool" as she
did,
and she effectively closed off the possibility of contact with a large
number of people. It was very sad to watch, and we could only hope that
she would grow out of the phase soon.
I know many
adults who do the same thing--they're so caught up in the way they look
that they obsess about their clothing and their hair and their
make-up. They spend hours on these things when a few minutes a day
would do. They've bought into the idea that looks are everything,
and they're doing their best to impress others with the way they
look. And they accomplish that in the short run. They're
missing the bigger picture, though. Most people see through the
looks and the clothing rather quickly, and realize that they're dealing
with people who aren't addressing the substantive part of their lives,
people who are so caught up with the outside that they're neglecting the
inside. They're unhappy and stressed out if they don't look just
right (and sometimes even if they do), and they're much more likely to
lose their peace of mind over a stained dress or shirt or coat than other
people who may attend closely to their looks, but who don't make them the
major focal point of their lives.
The
other side of vanity is the false impression that one gets of oneself
because of their exaggerated evaluation of themselves and their looks
and/or abilities. They may be constantly in the company of admirers
or wanna-be's, but they fail to acknowledge the fact that these people
around them are in serious need of help to find their own
identities. The vain person is at best annoying, at worst, useless
to others. There's a certain arrogance that comes with vanity, and
that arrogance keeps the vain person from seeing the needs of those around
them. While they may be quite happy about themselves, that happiness
comes at a cost. Self-satisfaction on one level can keep us from
trying to improve other aspects of our lives. How many of the
high-school beauty queens end up not even going to college or trying to
start a career, for they've let their vanity carry them through their
high-school years, and haven't done a thing to try to improve their minds
or cultivate friendships?
The vain person
is to be pitied, for that person has a very unrealistic perception of just
who he or she is. That person may bask in the admiration that comes
because of his or her looks or clothes, but that admiration is fleeting
and insincere. The bottom line is that the person is a human being,
with wants and needs and desires just like the rest of us. That
person needs to learn about him or herself and about life, but is probably
neglecting both areas. Other people have heaped praise upon the
person about one aspect of his or her life, and that person has focused
all his or her energy on that one aspect. Their feelings of success,
their self-esteem, their feelings of accomplishment all stem from that one
aspect of themselves. And we all know what happens when that one
aspect goes bad.
(And as a postscript, the young lady did grow out of the phase
rather quickly and became one of the least vain people I've ever
known--a truly loving and caring person who I believed learned a
lot from going through that particular phase.)
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