I love fashion, and I love doing hair and nails and feeling like I am put together on a regular basis. Don’t even get me started on makeup, because I love the stuff. In the U.S., these things are readily enjoyable. I was down to a 10 min routine at home that left me feeling confident and ready to face my day. Although this routine has to change on the race (heck, sometimes we don’t even have water), there are still opportunities to fix your hair and wear cute clothes. And actually, you can wear makeup everyday of the race if you really want to. And even my toenails have stayed painted this whole time (even though my feet are wrecked from physical labor and miles upon miles of walking). My point here I guess, is that you don’t have to become jungle Jane to go on the race. You don’t have to buy all of your clothes from an outdoors store, and you can still accessorize as much as your heart desires.
But I feel like there is a lot of pressure on world race girls to give these things up for the race. Maybe this is just an unspoken pressure I put on myself. Maybe it is a real thing, I don’t really know. But what I do know is that I have felt the judgments as I am putting on my makeup in the morning, or picking out a dress to wear as opposed to grungy jeans and a t-shirt.
So I decided to dig deeper into my soul to figure out why I felt judged. I thought about all of my clothes back home, and my flat iron waiting for me, and realized that I actually love these things a little too much. And then I thought: what if the world was ending and there was no power and no mirrors and no makeup? What would I do with myself? In every zombie movie I have seen, the girls don’t have makeup, or straighteners, or showers. They seem fine right? Well aside from the zombies trying to eat them- they still look pretty.
And then I thought about looking pretty and about how much that really means to me. I thought about my identity, and about what defines me. I have come to the conclusion that my makeup doesn’t make me who I am. I can’t let it. Cute clothes don’t make you a better person. They don’t make you more loved by God, or more self sacrificing and genuine. It is okay to look nice and enjoy shopping and beauty products, but it is not okay to let these things dictate your confidence, and I realized that there have been so many times in my life that they have. God forbid someone knows I have a zit, or crazy hair when I wake up in the morning.
I let myself be comforted by the ability to hide my flaws. This is not how God created us to be. We are called to be confident solely because we have a God that loves us and made us to be perfect representations of himself. It is so amazing to me that there is nothing I can do that will keep Him from loving me. He loves me even when I look like crap, even when my life is a mess and I have mascara running down my face from crying. He is still there. I have also decided that flaws are going to be okay with me. Flaws make us more relatable, and more human. Maybe I will still wear makeup, and find joy in looking good on occasion. But if I get caught without my makeup, covered in dirt, not showered and in the middle of a village in Africa, I will force myself to be okay, and to remember that these things don’t matter in the long run, and they do not dictate true beauty. Stripped down to nothing, I will still be me, and I will be able to learn more about myself in the moments when my life isn’t all primped and put together. I will embrace them for what they are, even if I have to remind myself everyday.
Doing nails for a little girl in Honduras (using my love for girly things for good!)
