The Vast Difference That Often Exists Between Physical Appearance and Character of Mind

O wad some Power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as ithers see us – “To a Louse” Robert Burns (1786)

In the animated “The Mind Body Problem”, the highly insightful School of Life explains that the idea self exists in two parts; whom a person feels themself to be and the external package that they’ve been given through no choice of their own. It is this constant battle between the mental and the physical realm that causes a great deal of discontent, particularly when stereotypes are assigned to a person because of the way they look.

It isn’t merely that we feel unattractive: we feel something bigger: misrepresented – as if we have been forced go into the world as an ambassador for a country we don’t actually inhabit or identify with. … The solution is to recognise that the problem is an existential part of being human and therefore to strive always to remember, in spite of all the visual evidence, and in a spirit of love, that the bodies of others are very separate from the character of their minds – in the hope that others will gift us a comparably generous and kind interpretation when their gaze turns to our own faces and bodies.