When I was a teenager, I made all my own clothes. My mother couldn't afford to go out and buy all those hip things that everyone was wearing. I used to buy fashion magazines for inspiration. And I would see all these incredibly gorgeous, thin models in these clothes. Then I would try to make the clothes and wonder why I didn't look as good in them as the models did.
Before long, my mother caught on to what I was thinking, and told me it was never too early to start reading every day what she called "Mrs. Eddy's beauty treatment." She was talking about the pages around 246–248 of Science and Health. Of course, Mary Baker Eddy didn't refer to this section as a beauty treatment. But it does have a lot of wonderful ideas on the subject.
These pages are full of references to models—to what we hold up as the model we're hoping to emulate. Even as a young teenager, I appreciated the idea that maybe those fashion models weren't what I was supposed to be holding up as my ideal. First of all, there was really no chance that I ever would look like they did. And even if I did, looking like that wouldn't really bring me happiness. It wouldn't make me a better person.
