Let us talk about beauty.
I am beautiful. I am full of face and have eyes that men have fallen head-long into like a chasm of grief and pain and pleasure and have been lost. Forever. I have a mouth full and sweet like a rosebud, just on the cusp of bursting into a full and long flower that men have kissed and nibbled and sighed into. I have full breasts and midnight hair that tumbles down my back. Yes, it’s true, I am beautiful.
In our society beauty can be everything. Ever since I was a girl all around me have commented upon my face, later my body. I have held value because of these things. I have been lost and devoured and used because of these things. I recognize that I am beautiful, but what is that exactly?
I am visually appealing. I am easy to look at. I invoke pleasant feelings in those who glance in my direction. I kill myself slowly a little more every day to live up to the expectations that others have placed upon me and that I have made my own. I starve myself; I fill my body with chemicals in a desperate attempt to become thinner. Diet pills, laxatives, endless diuretics. This is some months. Then there are the months when I am so exhausted and spent that I just eat to fill the hole left behind. I am filled with guilt and pain and I am filled with more guilt. Every morsel is a punishment and I do this to remind myself that I must be beautiful to have worth. I obsess and the ones who love me the most suffer with me.
The funny thing is I do not believe that others must live this standard that has been set for me. I recognize the beauty in others I love so much. Fierce independence, self-assuredness, the ability to survive, spirituality, loyalty, innocence, worldliness, a loving nature, a protective nature; all are things of beauty and make the bearer beyond compare. I even recognize some of these qualities in myself.
Yet…
Yet, in my darkest hours it’s the ugliness in my psyche that haunts me. In my deepest of depths every pill, every morsel withheld, every graze of the razor across my arms and wrists and thighs is a secret message to myself; a message that says “You must do this to be loved.”
It seems boundless, this pit that I have dug for myself, but I have just written this down. I have acknowledged that it happens. This is my admonition, my cry for help, my pact with all of you and with myself to stop this insanity. I will stop this. I will write and maybe even talk and I will stop this.
I want to be free.
Beauty can be a crippling force in our lives. It makes us feel a strange responsibilty to others, as if we MUST please them through ourselves. I'm so glad this topic has been brought to light here at TPJ. I think its something that is so divisive and misunderstood.
ReplyDeleteI heard you, I read every word you said and I heard your voice. I am here thinking of you and lending my energy to your recovery. Please update and tell us how you're doing...
ReplyDeleteBeing beautiful is a crippling experience for both women and men alike. I was, myself, at one point in my life quite lovely. I also worked with models for many years and noticed a definite lack of character, lack of maturity in all of us. Our value system was flawed, sometimes to the extreme. When we grow up physically beautiful, people do for us what we should do for ourselves. We are excused from many task and duties because we are pretty. We are never properly taught, disciplined and because of this we never matured. We are awarded social status that we do not deserve nor are ready for. We are gifted materials items and wealth because of our beauty and that denies the ability and value of earning our own way and the beauty of growing strong inwardly. We have an overblown sense of selves, of our personal worth and value of money. We are artificial, prideful and vain. We are unformed spiritually and stunted emotionally. We are indeed used and abused because the men who are attracted to us are shallow and vain themselves and desire not to be with us because of who we are but because of how we look. We hold as much as their car, or watch or shoes. We are merely something else for them to wear. We are only something else for them to show off to their so called friends. We are an object, a thing, not a real woman. We are a Doll…When we begin to fade, as the worlds idea of beauty always does, we are traded in for a newer model. When we break, as all immature people do, we are thrown away, like a thing without use. If we are lacking morals and depth and fullness we become crushed under the weight of it all. This is not the end of the story though….it is in the fading of the curse of beauty that we bloom. It is in the dying of the outward self that we turn inward and question, confess and grow. To question self, motives and purity is beautiful. To desire to be a better person, to place others first, to grow as sister, daughter, mother and wife, to age with grace and dignity is TRUE BEAUTY. Redefine the word beautiful and BECOME your hearts definition and you stop all that shaving, pill taking, obsessive behavior. When you are secure with your insecurities real life begins.
ReplyDeleteI've never been beautiful. When skinny, I was "cute." I've always been jealous of and hateful towards The Beautiful People, because all I could see was that everything was given to them, that life was easy for them.
ReplyDeleteI saw that The Beautiful People never had to work for, or learn, or expend effort for a damned thing. I saw that I was always expected to work harder, be better, and take more crap to even get to sniff the scraps these people left behind.
And all I could ever see was unqualified Beautiful People given jobs, promotions, discounts, presents, money, favors, and just a generally better life than anyone else, even though they were shallow, petty, superficial, worthless individuals.
This vein ran so deeply in me, that I have often been mean/rude/discriminatory to The Beautiful People. A Karmic Avatar, it's been my goal to smack these people with the side of my Shortsword of Fairness, because nothing, and I mean NOTHING, outrages me more than unfairness.
In other words, The Beautiful People were a waste of humanity that had everything handed to them, free of charge.
After having read the Anon submission and the Me comment above, I will have to re-think my attitudes towards The Beautiful People and try to change them. I don't know if I'll be successful, but I will try.
So, I hope you can see that the effort of submitting/commenting has the power to change things, one person at a time.