Beauty Is Not A Solution
I am crying in your arms. Something wet and messy. Something that’s better kept in dark rooms in dark nights, far away from everyone else.
“Don’t cry, you’re a beautiful young lady”
“There’s no reason to be insecure, there are so many people who find you desirable”
“You are a stunning woman”
And I say thank you, because that’s what’s allowed. And now it’s embarrassing, because I never asked for that. I never asked for beautiful. I never thought that beautiful was the opposite of unhappy. That beautiful was the solution to insecure, to depressed. But, whenever I find myself confiding in someone else, beauty is always there. Beauty is always me, even when I don’t want it. Even when ugly is more comfortable, accurate, solution-based. Beauty is what I’m given by those who are meant to care for me.
Beauty has always been postured as the antithesis of unhappiness. I have been striving for beauty since I realized what it was, and recognized what it felt like. I started shaving my face in the seventh grade. I started plucking my eyebrows in the ninth. I wore my glasses on the edge of my nose so no one could tell how big it was. And at the first opportunity, I switched to contact lenses. None of this was ever for myself.
I didn’t feel happy doing any of those things, I felt desperate. I felt like I was trying to win a race I was already late for. There’s a clear line between the things I did to feel beautiful in those years, and the things I do now. There is joy in applying pink blush across my cheeks and painting my eyebrows orange. There is comfort in lining my lips and putting on lip gloss. Space between my body and my clothes is what allows me to move. I’m not trying to win anything anymore, I just know what it takes to feel like myself. And that doesn’t always include beauty.
Sometimes I want to be beautiful. I want to feel like I’m straight out of a young adult novel, and everyone who sees me falls into some level of obsession. I want to feel like nothing can touch me, because I’m perfect. There’s nothing to critique, and nothing to say. But, sometimes, I want everything but beauty. I want no one to see me. I want to be invisible, and ugly and inhuman and hard-to-place. I want to cover myself in a cloak and trudge through an alleyway and talk to no one but myself.
And I’ve realized I can be the happiest either way. I’m at a point in my life where the imaginary race to beauty isn’t solving my problems. I am in a car on a track, by myself. Freestyling. Reflecting. Going at my own pace. And beauty is there sometimes, but it’s like the presence of a hum. Not a prize, not a solution and certainly not happiness.
