Cindy Bosley's Failure

In Cindy Bosley’s sincere recount of her failure as a pageant contestant she steps back as an adult and explores her surprisingly not-so-shallow teenage years. Early childhood is where we form some of our most character building habits and it was no different for Bosley, she recalls camping out in her living room acting as a pageant judge. Reinforcing her judgemental characterics she later judges all of her pageant competition, “Macy was smart but had no breasts or hips. Carol was pretty but totally uncoordinated…” (34). While these petty thoughts drifted through her teenage head, concerns of her mother plagued her subconscious. As she worried of how she would pay for proper pictures, instead of rejoicing when she was able to have the professional pictures done, she worries further of how her mother humiliated herself in order to pay for them. It seems Bosley shows how she matured

through her loss of the pageant, but in reality she was already matured with concerns of her mother. “But the truth is that I’d lost the contest when I told the judges, when they asked, that my most personal concern was my mother’s loneliness…” (35). Her candid answer is not an immature, shallow, teenager answer. Her answer is that of a teenager who grew up too fast. A teenager who saw her mother suffering. As a teenager she suspected it was just her answer that led to her loss, she is not wrong, but as she grows up she further reflects, observing that all of her childhood was leading up to that single moment.
That single moment, that utterance of words to the judges, what she was really concerned with, set her apart from her peers.

She spends a large portion her life trying to fit in. In early childhood she learned what was “normal” or “beautiful” through pageants, she then tries to match the other girls wealthier clothing style through cheap knock off kmart clothes, furthermore she knows that her pictures up against her house will push her out of the competition because they will not look like the other girls’ professional photos. Until that moment her whole childhood had been a struggle to just fit in, but after she voices her concerns aloud she transitions from an insecure teenager trying to fit in, to a self aware adult who realizes she cannot cover up her upbringing in a low income household in a backwater town, “...where my mother would go on to work in a bathtub factory, and then a glue factory, and then an electrical connectors factory…” (36). She realizes that instead of masking her circumstances to fit in, she needed to accept her background for what it is in order to overcome

it.