happy and healthy and to joyfully dance my own life, I didn’t need to do more or try harder.
What I needed was to strip out of all that I had layered on in an attempt to be what I was “supposed to be” and expose myself exactly as I was. FLAUNT! showed me that I was a smart, capable, and dedicated mom, wife, and career woman, who also happened to be smart, sexy, and spiritual. And that was okay! Revealing my truth, my core essence, the divine goddess I was inside, and bringing in all versions of everything I had ever been, empowered me to re-choreograph a new life that was more spectacular, more satisfying, and more fully my own than I had ever dreamed possible.
Through the five steps of FLAUNT! — Find Your Fetish, Laugh Out Loud, Accept Unconditionally, Navigate the Negative, and Trust Your Truth — and using burlesque as the vehicle, you can recognize and release the inhibitions and judgments that are covering you; reveal all facets of your authentic, core self (ahem, your inner burlesque star); and re-choreograph a brilliant, connected, and deeply satisfying life that reveals your beauty, brains, and beliefs so you can find the authentic joy, fulfillment, and self-acceptance that you crave. Are you ready to find your Naked Self-Worth and to sparkle? Then let’s FLAUNT!
The Costumes and Steps Required for the Dance of Perfect Womanhood
Most of us have been wearing the costumes of the roles we play for so long that we’re not even aware that we are wearing them. We play a million different roles and have a million different responsibilities, and knowing our roles so well, we are adept at quick costume changes, of switching seamlessly between our various identities. Yet while we are often clear on how to live up to these roles, we are rarely clear on how to live up to being ourselves.
Growing up, I asked myself what I wanted to do with my life, not who I wanted to be. I never asked myself, Who are you, Lora, deep inside, exclusive of your labels, roles, and scripts, and what kind of a woman would you like to be? or What do you need to do in order to create and sustain internal satisfaction, despite external circumstances? No, I was more focused on answering questions like, Where should I go to college? What should I major in to ensure that I get a job? and What are the next steps to take in order to achieve my career goals? Nor did I ever sit down and plan out how I was going to do what I aspired to do while still being who I authentically was. You may have been the same way, more focused on doing than being. And it’s my hunch that you never asked yourself deep, provocative questions about who you were inside and how you were going to integrate your honest expression of self with all that you wanted to do, either.
In my case, I modeled the behavior of those I loved, adopted the actions of those I admired, emulated beliefs of those I respected, and fumbled my way into adulthood, for right or for wrong. I’m guessing that I’m not alone, and like mine, many of your identities were created inadvertently over time, with little or no conscious awareness on your part of how they showcased or masked the woman you were inside.
Come with me, as I reveal the stories that created me, the masks that hid me, the costumes that enhanced me, and the roles in which I was cast.
My Childhood: The Tightly Corseted Little Princess
If you have seen a sitcom or a movie about a stereotypical family from the late seventies or early eighties, then you know much about my life. I had an unremarkably normal, white, Protestant, middle-class childhood, smack-dab in the middle of the good old US of A. Probably the only feature that made my family distinctive was that I was an only child, an only grandchild on both sides, and the only great-grandchild.
Yes, I was spoiled, but as the pride and joy of so many adults, I had to be perfect, because I was the only one. In order to get the praise that I so desperately desired, I had to live up to everyone’s expectations, and I laced those expectations, like a corset, around the foundation of my being, dancing everybody else’s choreography and making myself into exactly what others wanted me to be.
But, as perfect as I tried to be, I was still a free-spirited, fun-loving little girl, and there was no better way to express myself than through dance. Dancing got me out of my head and enabled me to flow free. Not only did dance provide an outlet for everything that was inside me; it also necessitated fancy dresses, sequins, rhinestones, tiaras, and feathers. I loved makeup, glitter, fancy hairstyles, and everything beautiful, feminine, and larger than life — exactly what my tightly laced soul wanted me to be!
This is how my journey into “perfect womanhood” began, and how my foundation was created. No matter what roles I added to my repertoire, and no matter what costumes I wore, underneath I kept the role of the perfect little princess alive and well, corseting myself into the ideals others set forth for me and oftentimes putting my own needs last. Much of my sense of worth came from how well I could please others, doing what they expected, following their rules, and dancing the dance they choreographed for me. Never mind that I sometimes had to cover, or mask, my true self in order to comply.
My Adolescence: Girls Who Wear Glasses
As a preteen, although ready to take off the tightly laced corset of my childhood and begin creating some of my own choreography, I was way too self-conscious and softhearted to show my peers who I really was and risk rejection. After all, I was not a jock or one of the pretty, popular girls. I was a studious ballet dancer who loved horses.
To make matters worse, I had recently gotten glasses — huge, round things with swooping sides and a hint of lavender — and popular girls didn’t wear glasses! Since being a nerd was not what I aspired to, I wore my smart-girl glasses only in class, when I wanted to see the chalkboard, shoving them in my purse between classes and squinting my way down the hall the rest of the time. Because my parents said embarrassing and unhelpful things like “Just be yourself, sweetie!” I looked to my peers for interpretation of what made preteen girls fabulous, popular, and worthy. And because the image I saw looked nothing like me, I knew that covering up was my only option.
I surmised that if I could make myself look like a popular girl on the outside, nobody would notice that I was a total misfit on the inside. Great plan, right? Covering my body with the requisite dress code meant Levi’s 501 jeans and IZOD polos, with a coordinating ribbon around the neck and Nike tennis shoes. Except that my family didn’t have room for extras in the budget, and name-brand clothes were definitely extras. Not to be deterred, I focused my back-to-school shopping efforts on obtaining suitable knockoffs. JCPenney had polos with a fox instead of an alligator that I could obscure with the ribbon, leaving me confident that others would think it was an alligator, but the coveted Nikes were too expensive. Kinney Shoes had knockoff tennis shoes with a whale-shaped logo instead of the real Nike swoosh, and better yet, the knockoff pair came in lavender!
Happily covered in my knockoff popular-girl clothing, I marched to school, where the most popular, gorgeous eighth-grade boy ever looked down at my bright white shoes with the lavender whale swoosh, smirked, and said, “What kind of shoes are those?”
If you were ever an insecure adolescent girl, then you may relate to my level of mortification. I might as well have been naked, I felt so exposed! Shoes that I dearly loved the night before now filled me with embarrassment. How could I have been so stupid as to pick lavender? Real Nikes weren’t lavender! Those shoes had been a terrible cover.
Speaking of terrible covers, I was terribly weary of covering my love of school, reading, and studying. Although I had always excelled in school, my role of the good girl kept me quiet about my achievements. After all, good girls didn’t brag or make others feel bad! If I couldn’t express myself the way I wanted in the fashion arena, maybe I could drop my cover in the academic arena, play the role of smart girl, and stand proud in my lavender smart-girl glasses instead of hiding behind them.
I registered for a science class rumored to be taught by the hardest teacher at school. The first day of class, the teacher’s antics did not disappoint. Pacing around the room, he gestured to the pull-down periodic table of the elements and carried on about how we needed to memorize that table by the end of the week. No problem, I was great at memorization!