The Rantings of an Old Man, if you call 86 old.

By Ernest A. Herr

About Self- Image

          This has got to be one of the most important things in your life; just what do you think of yourself. Maybe it starts with your physical image. Are you a good looking person or are you kind of homely? Are you a smart person or do you feel like a dumbbell? Do you feel important or are you a nobody?

          These are cruel thoughts when you deal with them but, if you are to be at all happy, you must come up with some answers. If you look at the person at the right, you see a person who had a very low self image. He is, or was, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Actually, a Frenchman of royal heritage and possibly in line for the throne of France if his luck had just been a little better. Injured in the legs as a boy, his legs never grew to their proper size and this gave him a very strange appearance and hence the long coat. With this poor image, he found that he had trouble attracting women and so ended up spending much time in French bordellos where his money made up for his being a poor cut of a man. This also enabled his colleges to come up with a nick-name that further damaged his self-image; Too Loose in stead of Toulouse -- very cruel.

         So what was Toulouse (notice, that I don't call him Too Loose) to do. Well, he found that he had some artistic abilities and thought that he could become a painter and restore some of his self-image. This actually worked out quite well as you can see for yourself in a few of his paintings shown below.

        This worked out so well for him that he became quite a celebrity and man about town even though he was only a little over three feet tall. When sitting on a bar stool he looked almost normal and his life took a wonderful turn for the better. To keep up his wonderful disposition though, he ended up consuming more than his share of fine whiskeys and ended up as a drunk. Too much time on the bar stool.

       Since I'm using his story as an example of what a person could do to overcome a poor self image, I won't dwell on this aspect of the story except to say that even a wonderful recovery of a self-image can be overdone. And spending a lot of time sitting on a bar stool may not be the best way to try to find a better self- image -- but then, whatever works.