Sick of being Beautiful

I’m tired of beauty, and what it takes to get there. It always seems much closer than it is. Like, the moment you lose 20lbs, or grow longer hair, or have a particular skin tone suddenly you’ll be attractive. But the moment you get there—lose the 20lbs, have hair down to your elbows, and tan (or lighten) your skin, suddenly there’s more to do. Suddenly there are dark spots on your face that need to be cleared up, you realize you need lighter hair, and better clothes to suit your new form. Where does it end? I’m tired of this. I’m sick to my bones of never being good enough. Tired of having to chemically straighten the hair on my head and wax my eyebrows. Why aren’t they good enough being how they meant themselves to be?

As a kid, I often thought of my mother as being the pinnacle of beauty. I thought no one could compare to how gorgeous she was and how wonderful she smelled. My mother had long wavy dark hair at that time and skin that is very light. Although Haitian she is mixed with some fairer races. The one thing I wanted more than anything was to look like her. I didn’t understand that this wasn’t possible for me. All I knew was that kids were supposed to look like their parents, and I wasn’t sure that I looked like the one parent I really wanted to. It was a sore spot for a lot of my life. I didn’t know that I looked like my mother who was beautiful; I didn’t know whether or not I was beautiful.

Jr. High I wore lots of tight uncomfortable clothes that were in style thinking if I stayed within the trends, I would finally be able to stake my claim to being pretty. Then in High School, I forgot to worry about it. I wore whatever I felt like without much thinking about what I looked like. I figured it didn’t matter if I tried or not because being ideally attractive just didn’t occur to me as something I needed to worry about. That’s when my mother and my sister (who always had been praised for looking like Halle Berry) began to give me tips. I was told that I should always wear earrings or I wouldn’t look pretty. Lose weight or I’d never have a boyfriend. I had to do my hair in very specific styles. If I asked my dad for money to buy food he’d say: “Aren’t you on a diet?”

I don’t blame them for thinking the way they do. If you don’t at least try to meet society’s requirements for attractiveness then there’s something wrong with you. My family knew what was implicitly expected of me, and tried to make things easier by urging me to go along with them. As far as I can see, I’ve just been victimized over and over again by the beauty industry. We all have. Telling us that our skin has to be soft, wrinkle free, spotless and white, for it to be beautiful--Telling us that our hair has to be straight, soft and long for it to be pretty, that we have to make our toes look like lollipops in order to feel like women. That we have to be a weight which may not be right for our body types.

And the craziest thing about it is that beauty isn’t even real. Beauty is our attempt to assert control over what we are attracted to. The REAL thing is attraction, which is completely uncontrolled. The word beauty is just artificial validation. Imagine: you have believed your entire life, wavy black hair to be beautiful. If you meet someone who you have a mutually deep connection with, that has a mini-fro, does that mean you aren’t attracted to the mini-fro? You can be equally attracted to both things, except wavy black hair has society’s stamp of approval, and a mini-fro doesn’t.

I guess what I’m battling with here is positive and negative categorization. The way society has a million little boxes for things and values some of those boxes more than another, when really its all just bullshit. No one is more beautiful than anyone else. You may find a certain person more attractive than another, but that doesn’t mean they are more beautiful.

I want everyone to realize that their value shouldn’t be stocked in things that are transient. If you are 120lbs today and 180 tomorrow, it really doesn’t matter, as long as who you are hasn’t changed. And someone out there will be attracted to you--equally as attracted to you as they would be to Anna Kournikova. Because you have more to offer than your hair and your weight.

Perfection

We are permanently bothered with the idea of perfection. I think it arises out of a need to one up ourselves; to keep pushing back the boundaries of what we think is possible. We seek to destroy our limitations. Without holding up this idea of perfection, it really wouldn’t be possible for us to define how far a person’s capabilities can go. We’d be in that horrifying gray space where our brains go haywire. That space where too much unchartered possibility is present. But the more I look at my experiences trying to define the word, the more it occurs to me that most of the time when we talk about something being perfect, our expectations are that others will be able to agree with us. It makes sense. Mostly I expect the people who I share culture with (culture here being defined as shared experience) to agree with something I find pleasant or unpleasant. But it doesn’t really matter how much experience I share with another person, chances are we have still had very individual interactions with the world. That’s why perfection is the result of very specialized experiences and therefore a universal understanding of it is impossible. But this raises another question. If an individual thinks something is perfect and no one else agrees does perfection exist? If I see a ghost and no one else can see it, was the ghost there? I think this is the problem we run in to with our definition of the word. We are invalidating it, saying that it doesn’t exist because everyone is experiencing it so differently.

But what if we stopped thinking of perfection as something that is opinion, or something that just happens—What if we began to see perfection as something created. For instance, before I began intense study of classical music, I was generally not very interested in it. I had to learn why it was beautiful before I could find it that way. Same goes for wine. I don’t think anyone is born enjoying the flavor of fermented grapes. Eventually though, we gather up enough experiences to be able to create the enjoyment for it within ourselves. Creation has always been one of our greatest powers. Perfection is there to help us destroy our limitations, but perhaps this doesn’t mean we have to set the bar higher. Perhaps it means getting rid of the bar altogether and using the power of our minds to look at anything and find where it is absolutely perfect.

I’m going to apply this to my life, right now. I am nowhere near where I thought I’d be at this point. I fully expected, that by now I’d be in grad school, that I’d be living on my own, I’d have much more money in my bank account, that I’d be several lbs lighter, etc. But instead, I find myself, still living at home, not in grad school, not much in the old bank account and pretty much the same weight I’ve been for a couple years now. Yet, I am absolutely happy. I am looking at my place in life and I am seeing how right it is. I don’t have to worry about rent, and I love my housemates deeply. Because Im not in grad school I have the opportunity to do opera programs that take place in the winter, really work on my acting, languages, voice, self-discipline while racking up on real world experience. I am finding work where ever I can which gives my schedule more flexibility to get the things done that I need to get done, and I am fully entrenched in that endless process of loving every centimeter of my body regardless of whether or not vogue magazine would put me on its cover. Essentially, my life is perfect. Not because it settles into that impossible shape our society considers the perfect life to fit into, but because I’ve created the perfection where it didn’t exist before. I’m choosing to notice a world of positive possibilities that are giving me so much to look forward to.

It’s so easy to look at where our relationships are not ideal and feel unsatisfied with them. But they can all be ideal, if we are willing to accept flaws for what they are and allow them to aid in building our concept of what makes something perfect. When Picasso began to make his works more abstract, it became difficult upon looking to see the form of whatever it was he was depicting. That’s because he was getting down to the essence of the thing, and the lack of its precise form made it closer to being real in a way. This is all about finding what we want in what we have, and allowing what we have, to be all we need to get what we want. Even the definition of the word perfection is created with imprecision’s and flaws. Let’s stop looking at things that do not appear pristine as defected and start seeing how the defects aid in making them all they need to be.

I’ll talk about my relationship with my brother. It is certainly flawed, but does that erase its ability to be perfect? Absolutely not! Sometimes it is difficult for us to communicate as it seems like we are involving ourselves in two different worlds, or I ask his opinion on something and his honesty advances the truest answer to me whether I like the way it is said or not, our schedules are almost entirely opposite, which makes it difficult for us to hang out as much as I’d like to. But every now and then we’ll end up getting to smoke a cigar together midday in my back yard, his honest opinion is exactly what I need to hear, or we’ll get to enjoy a TV show together, bond over some music, or talk about some social event where he unexpectedly saw a few friends of mine. Those moments have become special to me because of where our relationship is defected. The universe has a very particular balance that needs to be achieved right down to its most elementary particles. There must be things which we don’t like in order to make up what we do like and vice versa. In that way perfection is no different. If a thing is created entirely out of light, it is too bright for us, we don’t like it. We need a little bit of darkness to make it mean something.

Describing Reality

It occurs to me that reality is a concept we struggle with permanently. Like, every year, countless of movies try and tackle the topic. I remember when the Matrix came out and my thirteen year old self had finally seen a realization of some concepts she had been grappling with. Was my reality, I would often ask myself, real? After all, does an insane person know they’re insane? If your mind gets so locked up in its own perception, how could you conceive the existence of anything else? And even if you can imagine that there exists an alternate perception, its influence on you would remain very limited, like wearing a blindfold in a lighted room. Although there is light everywhere and your being remains aware of that, the blindfold keeps your eyes shrouded in darkness.

Over the past few days (or weeks, really), I’ve been combing through my own perception of reality. It’s just fascinating to me that the physical and metaphysical platform existing before us as reality is something we rarely consider. We are so used to it, and to a large degree already know what to expect from it, so that we actually don’t know what it is we are experiencing. That’s why I’m making an extremely unscientific attempt to understand my perception of it. Ha!

From what I can tell, there are several platforms which help us to form our perception. The first is the space being occupied. I mean this as both physical space, the room around you, the width, length depth and appeal of it. But what I mean by space is also meant to include the intangible platform which is created as we interact with others. Think about it like this: When you’re having a particularly fulfilling conversation with a friend, you are following the events they are describing. What they are saying to you appears in the mind, and as you include your own thoughts and ideas to theirs, something between you is being created--a platform or a dimension where understanding can be allowed to flow easily. It’s the space created as you visualize what they are talking about. I think we also create a new space when we encounter any form of art. When a musician plays their instrument, the audience listens and in order to achieve any kind of meaning from the music, they must create a metaphysical space outside of what presently exists. The same happens with art and all forms of theatre.

The next concept which I think effects your perception of reality is what you consider, based on experience and time, to be possible for the space which you created or have encountered. An example of this would be a person who is good at creating artwork, and another person who isn’t. The Artist looks at their medium, or the “space” available and see’s possibilities for that medium that the other person cannot. Looking at their canvass, the artist senses possibilities for a certain mixture of color, the certain bend of a line, the particular stance of a brush which have all been encouraged by past experience (Parents, teachers, friends which have validated the artist’s choices). While the person who is not an artist, doesn’t have the same objects in their toolbox to even perceive how the creation of a masterpiece on their canvass could be possible, regardless of how much they wish to create one. Time makes its way into this idea in that it is so deeply intertwined with experience that they cannot be separated from each other. I’ll define time in this case as being both memory and supposition. Supposition encompassing the future (that is to say the things you suppose will happen next), Memory encompassing the past, and both overlap to create the present. I don’t think they way we charter time, in minutes, seconds, hours really works when talking about reality, because I can never remember those conventions when I remember something that happened in the distant past, and there really isn’t a way to tell If something you plan to do will occur at the exact moment you expect that it will.

Mood is also a layer contributing to how we see our reality. As is clear to all of us when one is feeling particularly low, it is incredibly difficult to see the space being occupied in the same light as others who are occupying it. A sad person may not be able to realize just how beautiful a sunrise is, at that moment, they cannot be aware of the full range of possibilities available in that space. Their choices in how to look upon the sunrise become limited by their mood, and therefore much of the depth of feeling one would get by looking at it is erased. This idea fits being in a very good mood as well. An example of what I am talking about can be found in music. For instance, whenever a single note is played, there are actually a series of overtones which exist and sound simultaneously with it. Those overtones are like the possibilities a person’s mind instantly creates when they enter any kind of space. A computer can recreate every note in an overtone series, take them away and even add them. One tone playing by itself is called a sine wave. Your mood is like a computer, adding and subtracting sine waves whenever you encounter a situation that changes how you feel.

Putting together all the concepts I’ve written about makes me think a lot about solitude. It has always been my guess that the reason why solitude is such an important part of literature, or an important part of the lives of artists, is that it allows us to break free from the imposing reality of others. That way we can create our own reality. Think about it, whenever absolute freedom is depicted in our society, a person is alone. I remember all those car commercials happening in the open desert, a single man in his convertible with the wind whipping back his hair. The sense of freedom is depicted through his loneliness. Because he is alone he doesn’t have to bend to the rules which exist as a result of having to share his reality with others. He can create his own rules, decide for himself what is best to do and what isn’t. Solitude is important for those of us who feel an obligation to create. That time is needed in order to fashion a concept of reality which we hope perhaps others will find themselves capable of relating to.

The best thing about all this is that it leaves me in complete awe of our capabilities as humans. We so automatically create these spaces for ourselves without having to work hard. It’s truly unbelievable that the simplest of our actions is the most mystifying and complex ability if you dedicate any amount of thought to it. Today I am going to look at every single moment that I occupy as having the most vibrant series of overtones, the most inexplicably gorgeous possibilities.

From Blossoms

BY LI-YOUNG LEE

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Anything Essential is Invisible to the Eye.

“What I’m looking at is a shell. What’s important is invisible.”

There are so many ways that one can know a person and it seems to me that the only ways which we are willing to recognize are very surface. I’m unsatisfied with how rarely people go deep with each other in popular culture. I think it’s because our society tends to base your value as a person, on what you look like. Now, I can see how we might have learned to do this. I think there is actually an element of survival involved. If we can learn what to expect from people, simply by looking at them, then we’d most certainly be safer for it. So of course, those people who have the ability to soften our eyes with their features, why shouldn’t we trust them more? Why shouldn’t we expect the most from them? Those people with qualities that we find aesthetically irresistible, they get away with so much. We forgive them for being less intelligent, for having ignorant views, for being assholes, because simply being in their presence is some kind of socially validating experience.

I’m quoting the little prince a lot, but there is a part of the book I’ll never forget. It says: “Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, “What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?” Instead, they demand: “How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?” Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.”

I think, the more we stray away from figures about people, the more we feel as if we are on unchartered territory, the scarier things feel. Getting to know someone beyond what is surface requires confrontation. You don’t go deep without resistance on both sides. It’s funny, because personally, this is the place that I love to go with people. When you start getting to who a person really is, it’s similar to driving in the dark with no lights on, except sometimes you find that you and the other person are figuring out the road and navigating safely together without needing any lights. That’s a really special feeling. It’s when you get to this place that you can make sense of the idea that what you are seeing when you look at someone else is a shell, and the good parts are inside of it. That’s when you can really get the specialness in the sound of a person’s voice, and the games they like to play, and whether or not they collect butterflies. I think I became fascinated with the hidden parts of people at some point during High School, where I realized that understanding people, their motivations, pasts and fears, would help me to become a better writer. I don’t know if it did work in that way, but the desire created something in me that makes my life very interesting at times.

Except sometimes I wish it didn’t make me so aware. It can become so painful, so ridiculously boring to be always asking for more from people than they know how to give you. Most people go into a club, scantily clad, grinding to songs about frivolous sex and unhealthy relationships, while drinking alcohol without once considering the reality of what they are doing. Me, I enter a situation like that and my brain starts working. I’m thinking that, although I love dancing, that this space was created for people to find someone to sleep with. It’s created to get you into the mood for finding a mate—a temporary one. It’s a situation created to help you fulfill a very primal need without the responsibility of getting to know someone. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or a good thing. I’d rather not judge it entirely. It just makes me sad, I guess. Those of us, who simply cannot turn off our brains when confronted with artificial connections, have trouble feeling like they fit in during those times.

I just want so much more than being pretty, or sexy, or any other of those silly ideals our society places on us. I want more than text messages and tweets, and Facebook chatting, and Google chatting, looking through someone’s online photo albums, and reading through a list of their interests and favorite movies and favorite TV shows. I want a smaller world where I know everyone in my neighborhood. I want to stay up late telling stories that make me feel…fulfilled, not because they are about earth shattering matters, but because they are told between friends, with genuine caring. I want to see the glaze in someone’s eyes when they talk about something they love, and I want to see the way they move their hands when telling a joke. I want to spend all my time with the people I know, gathering up into my memory those things about them that only become precious after death. I never liked waiting until the end of something to see how special it was.

This entry feels a little disjointed, but I’ve learned I shouldn’t expect much from my eloquence when mercury is in retrograde. :D

Who Created Who?

A world without God seems bleak, shallow, unreal and dishonest—to me anyway. It feels like a world that doesn't recognize goodness. But that idea, I have to admit has been carved into our consciousnesses. Maybe a world without god CAN recognize goodness and it's just harder to see. Like the way we rarely see earthworms, but know they're there because the good brown soil is there to remind us of its work. Sometimes god feels like the biggest cop out of all—a reason to avoid the face of our destinies and expect them to float up to us without any effort of our own. God gives us the right to let go—but should we be letting go? The idea that there is a God in the sky guiding every moment of our lives is slightly oppressive. Did my unconscious self feel the need for that and ask for it, or was this care relegated on me. Is it possible that everything I am---body, soul, spirit, ambition---is all I need to create my very own destiny? I like that a lot, that makes me feel like the most powerful being in the universe. That makes me feel like Eve, who ate from the tree of knowledge despite the rules, and made a hard life for herself—yes, but learned to relish her suffering as well as her pleasure, and learned too that both feelings are so intertwined, at times it is difficult to distinguish one from the other. If paradise had been ours, what would we have learned? We would have remained endlessly children. But I don't envy children and I never have. I would rather be blissfully aware than blissfully ignorant. I think the fall was a gift. I think we ought to thank Eve for what she did because if she hadn't, we would have lost our ability to choose. Anyway, I don't believe this story ever happened.

But metaphysical speculation leaves you all tangled up in sharp wires. There is so much that it is impossible to see clearly. Once again, I come back to the idea of God and I can't let it go. Believing in God is the most natural thing in the world to do, indeed if he didn't exist he would have to be invented. It's a part of our nature to recognize there is a huge current under the ocean of our consciousnesses, and the only thing keeping us aware of it is a ripple on top of the water. Things are going on we can't see, and if we could see them we wouldn't understand. The thousands of years of our existence have been spent inching closer and closer to spiritual truth. The closest I've felt to God hasn't been in a church (and trust me—I've seen and worshipped in plenty of them). It has been in moments when I've least expected it; moments which I've spent with nature, feeling a deep and contented connection with everything. Feeling like nothing mattered, and like every molecule in my body was bending towards every blade of grass, aching to be a part of every individual star, opening itself to every last particle of dirt. Moments like those occur, and I think: There. That is what I want from God. I want him to remind me that I am a part of everything and in everyone, and that the world and our existences are beautiful because of that. I want spiritual fortitude, I want God to remind me that I am human and because of that I am flawed--but must love myself regardless of that. Still though, I don't think I'm being entirely fair. Being in a church makes me feel so very mystified, a feeling that I like. I don't think churches are dead and spiritually empty. I think they are very alive with something. Being in a church makes me feel like the sky is cracked wide open with hope and forgiveness. There is a connection with other people and with yourself that happens there, which can so rarely happen anywhere else. Actually, it is similar to the feeling I get on the subway, or whenever I am with a lot of people at once. It's the feeling of being connected. So maybe God is wherever that connection is. And maybe that's why we are always seeking to force ourselves under one banner even if it's by way of violence, because mysteriously we long to be close to each other. Mysteriously, we are all aware of the connection which exists between us, but don't know how to handle it or what to do with it. Maybe sometimes it frightens us, too.

All this talk reminds me of Socrates and his talk of shadows in the cave. How the world as it truly is exists behind us, and the world that we are actually seeing is only a shadow, a wisp of the representation of the real thing. But at least in this realm of existence we can create things and control things and make our own lives—or at least get the sense of it. I wonder, how many realities it is possible to experience at once.

 

I don't think all this existential talk will ever end for me. I don't think I will ever come to a permanent conclusion as to what God is—so far, every single definition of him I've listened to makes me feel restless, like there is something I'm failing to notice or simply am not aware of. With talk of God, inevitably comes talk of death, and I'm not quite sure I'm ready to comb through my feelings on that, just yet.