Are You Too Afraid To Feel Beautiful?

Challenging the cultural messages that keep us from honoring and expressing our own beautiful.

I remember as a kid

jumping off the dining room table when no one was home, just to see if I could fly.

In the afternoons, I’d often go running out into the forests by our house wearing a long cape, the medieval kind, that my mother had sewn together from a brown bedsheet for a costume. Pretending to be a princess just dying for fresh air and freedom.

I used to sit for hours with a loving gaze at my little Barbie house, and her pink limousine with the hot tub in the back, mesmerized by all the pink and femininity. I couldn’t wait to grow up and live in that house, and have that car.

On family camping trips, I always packed one of those kid briefcases full of art supplies and spent the entire trip making art.

I wanted everything to be beautiful, and everything was beautiful to me. I wanted to make beautiful things. I wanted to feel, see, touch, and be beauty itself. Not because society and Disney movies told me to, but because beauty was and is the song that my heart longs to sing.

Little girls are told that being beautiful puts us in danger:

• Being beautiful makes us threatening to other women, they told us.

  It makes us popular, sure, but it also unlikeable to those that feel inferior to our beauty. Thus it can make us cruel without our meaning to be. We become icons of the unfairness of life.
  

• Being beautiful puts us in danger, they told us.

  In a patriarchal world where men want to possess women, they said. I truly believed that if I were beautiful, it made it less safe for me to go anywhere alone.
  

• Being beautiful makes us conceded, they told us.

  Selfish, vain. To acknowledge my own beauty would make me self righteous, and these are not qualities other people like. I would be unliked for it. The only way to be a beautiful was to not acknowledge one’s own beauty, to be absolutely humble to the point of ignorance.

Yet to not be beautiful is painful, too. Damned if we are, damned if we aren’t.

Besides, I wasn’t beautiful, they told me. I was gangly, awkward, and different. I wasn’t the picture-perfect blonde in class, I wasn’t the homecoming queen. I could never be her. And for some reason, any attempt I took to feel beautiful even as my own unique self was shut down by my peers. They couldn’t stand the thought that I would see myself as beautiful. I wasn’t allowed.

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When I lost my hair during chemo,

it was the most beautiful I had ever felt. That kind of beauty that ran so much deeper than long hair, a thin body, perfect skin and lips and eyes. Yet it also wasn’t the kind of beauty that’s only ‘on the inside’. That saccherine beauty they tell us to rely on when we don’t have the perfect features on the outside.
This beauty transcended both of those definitions. It was a real, honest, conscious beauty. The kind that I feel in nature, watching the sunset, or a flower blooming. It was something holy, something sacred to me. The beauty of aliveness, in motion.

As I returned back to ‘normal life’ after chemo, though, my beauty and the blooming flower I had become began to wither and fade. My confidence fell, standing once again beside girls my age, no longer in a hospital gown but in my old clothes that didn’t fit, now that I’d gained so much weight because of the steroids in my regimen. My scars, my bald head, my round face, it all made me stick out.
People would call me ‘beautiful’ often, as some kind of pathetic gesture. It was almost infuriating. I knew what they meant; they were trying to make me - and themselves - feel better. I made them think of sickness and death when they looked at me. Yes, they were proud of me for surviving. They were also scared of me, of what had happened to me.

So when they’d call me ‘beautiful’ and I knew what they meant was that I was pretty on the inside, which didn’t feel empowering. It felt like pity. It made me feel even uglier.

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Now, two decades later, I am redefining beauty yet again.

Beyond just the features about myself that I openly love; my gold-green eyes, my soft lips, my long legs.

Beyond also the relegation to beauty ‘on the inside’ through kindness, strength, compassion, resilience.

I am defining beauty now, for myself, as safe.

My feeling beautiful does not threaten other women, it can instead