I know this lens because I wore one for thirty years.
When I was about eight, my mother ran into a friend on the street. Chatting away, she gestured at me and my older sister and said — as if I couldn't hear — "Yanni's the clever one at school. But at least this one is pretty."
At least. As if beauty were the consolation prize. From that day, the sentence I carried everywhere was: I'm not good enough. Maybe if I try harder, I'll be enough. It didn't matter how hard I worked or what I achieved later — I could never shake it, because the lens was still on.
I spent years in the investment industry in Hong Kong, then over a decade coaching adults through the hardest stretches of their lives. And almost every time, when we traced the pain back far enough, it didn't start in their thirties or forties. It started in a moment from their teenage years — a sentence, a look, a comparison — that quietly became the lens they'd looked through ever since.
By the time it reached my coaching room, that lens had had decades to run the show. So I started asking a different question: what if I didn't wait for the blow-up? What if I met a young person while the lens was still soft enough to see — and change?
— Meiji Bennett