Humility, thy name is Kathy

Ah, the mind's eye. The little reality gyroscope that tells us whether life's glass is half empty or half full. For some of us, (the rose colored glasses set, that is) daily observations reveal what our optimistic natures perceive: people as good, other drivers as patient, fruit as ripe. You get the idea. It never occurs to us that there might be something rotten in Denmark. Just couldn't be. Not on our watch.

We expect things to turn out, we see the bright side, (sometimes with such obvious naivete as to provoke guffaws from our more taciturn companions.) In the name of positive thinking, we occasionally fool ourselves into a state of affairs that belies both truth and belief. We look in the mirror and see what we want (or maybe need) to see: youth, health, beauty. (Not to mention saintly goodness, generosity and a gentleness of spirit that perhaps, has never really existed.)

But when does a sense of relentless optimism and a slightly fuzzy mind's eye cloud important truth? When does positive thinking pervert honest appraisal?

I learned recently that a friend had described me to someone as lots of nice things AND a dead ringer for Kathy Bates. BLAM. Full Stop. Kathy Bates? Really? Oh dear. That's not what I see in the mirror. How could this be?

I compulsively googled Kathy Bates trying desperately to find an image of her that matched my own self perception. Surely, there was at least one picture of her that resembled Rene Russo in the Thomas Crown Affair. No luck. Kathy Bates is a great actress, an interesting woman and fine American but Rene Russo she ain't.

Now to be fair, Ms. Bates is a little older than me, but still, there ain't no denying it. There is a resemblance. We're both, er, not waif-like, rather full of face and with a certain determination in our expression that, well, is what it is.

It took me a while to wrestle with the though of resembling a character actress who plays crazy Stephen King spinsters, hot tub deperados and lesbian political operatives. And while I've never played any of these roles in my actual life, it doesn't give one great confidence to be compared to an actress who so convincingly conjurs such creatures.

But after a while I came to the conclusion that looking like Kathy Bates is no shame. While neither of us is model beautiful, we are reflective of a whole lot of real women whose beauty (and more importantly, whose value) comes not just from what we look like but also from what we do, who we are and how we serve our world.

If a dose of unvarnished reality is good for the soul, (and maybe an incentive to pep up the old exercise program) so is self-acceptance. So there.