beauty: the elusive shadow we live in

our uniquely designed torture chamber

Beauty is pain, by Arohi Gadagkar

We all know beauty is subjective. But lately I’ve been thinking more deeply about why.

My theory is that beauty is you as you dreamed you might be. Beauty’s subjectivity comes from everyone’s unique version of what beauty would look like on them. The people I find most beautiful are basically just more attractive versions of myself. They all have dark hair, glowy olive skin, are short, curvy, with dark eyes and striking features. My friends’ beauty obsessions are blonde haired, blue eyed, tall Dutch princesses, or women with pale skin and black hair. Basically: whomever is both extraordinarily beautiful and closest to their phenotype. Who we find most beautiful is often just an avatar of what we would look like if we were as close to perfection as possible.

The biggest thing I’ve noticed about beauty is that my vision of it has always been defined by my own insecurities. It’s shifted at different points in my life, depending on what I thought I needed more/less of. Isn’t that interesting? That what feels most beautiful to us is what we lack most. In that way, beauty is constantly shape shifting to show us what we are not. I think this encapsulates beauty’s grip on each of us quite well: it exploits the things about ourselves that make us wince. It looks at us in the mirror and tortures us each uniquely. This is why it is such a powerful ideal. No one is safe from it. Even the most objectively beautiful people in the world have insecurities—so-called imperfections—that might be invisible to everyone else but ring like glaring red sirens when they look at themselves in the mirror.

Tonight I wrote something (a poem? mini essay?) about beauty. Through writing it, one theme clearly rung through all of my experiences with beauty as a young woman: beauty hurts. And I don’t mean physically hurts—like getting your legs waxed or wearing high heels—I mean emotionally, beauty sears through your psyche and fills it with red hot pain.

Beauty is the goddess we all get on our knees to worship. Beauty humiliates us. It strips us of our pride, tears up our dignity, and makes us salivate over the idea of getting closer to it, of becoming it. Beauty finds our insecurities, rips them open and pours heaps of salt all over them. Beauty makes everything we don’t like about ourselves sting more. This passage from Ava’s April shelf-help issue captures the pain of wanting to be beautiful quite well:

“We all want to be beautiful, don’t we? As a girl it was more important to me than almost anything else. I’m embarrassed to admit that, but it’s true. And wanting to be beautiful as a woman, whether you are or you aren’t, is an awful experience. It eats you alive.”

Beauty stares back at us when we look in the mirror and points out all of our inadequacies. It takes our money, our confidence, our time, our appetite. We become its slave, if we aren’t careful. We make all these choices just so people think we are beautiful. And then what? We grow old, shed the beauty we traded our world for when we were young, and still yearn for it. It’s like this sick joke, the elusiveness of beauty. Beauty is like the anti-fairy god mother. It shows you what you could never have, and then says: try to get this. Beauty stares at you in the mirror and asks you:

If you could tweak yourself to perfection, what would that look like?

Women think about this all the time. Perhaps not in those words, but every woman can list their insecurities, easily. And those insecurities are just things we believe would make us more beautiful if they were different.

Everyone has that one feature that makes them wince—skin, hair, body, smile, eyes, nose. The thought of the ideal version of that thing is haunting. The perfect nose, the clear skin, the tight body. It torments you. It eats you alive. It’s inescapable. The desire to reach your uniquely impossible ideal.

In this poem-mini-essay, I wrote about the feeling of beauty tightening its grip on us. When it has you over a barrel—wishing for it, desperately. That’s when it causes real turmoil. Like when Ursula convinces Ariel to trade her singing voice to become human, beauty similarly promises you the thing you want most, and takes whatever it can from you in return.

Once you’re in its throes, beauty begins to wrap its fingers around your neck, pulling the oxygen away from other areas of your life (family, friends, work, health) and sucking that air towards an obsession with your appearance. It’s a scary feeling. Mostly because you’re willing to submit to it, to see the beauty you could grasp at the other end of it—of rigidity, of starving yourself, of obsession, of insanity. The paradox, of course, is that if you totally submit to obsession, you’ll overshoot beauty and fall into something else entirely, something much darker, something much more sticky and complicated to untangle yourself from.

So as much as it is tempting, it’s equally scary to submit to beauty’s grip on you. This is its duality: you know it’s probably bad to pursue beauty, but you still want a taste. And like a decadent dessert that makes your tongue sing, it’s hard to stop after only one bite. Once you begin to inch closer to the most beautiful possible version of yourself, the actions you could take to become more beautiful always loom in your mental horizon, tugging at your psyche whenever an insecurity catches your eye. There’s that American Psycho line that everyone loves to cite:

“You can always be thinner, look better.”— Patrick Bateman

There’s clearly something universal about this sentiment, considering it’s a 15 second video with 6.7 million views (there’s a metaphor somewhere in here about the inescapable pursuit of beauty coming from the lips of a serial killer, but I won’t mine it right now).

The thing about beauty is that it isn’t trivial. Life is easier if you’re beautiful. More doors will open for you. Whether we want to admit it or not, appearance affects perception. And positively affecting others’ perception of you is one of the best things you can do for yourself. But beauty only works to your advantage if you can negotiate with it, find a place for it in your life that doesn’t let it totally dominate you.

Beauty, of course, isn’t exclusively derived from your appearance. But you can’t just read that sentence and know it’s true. It takes time, experience to realize that, to feel it. It takes feeling beautiful without looking perfect to understand that beauty isn’t unidimensional—it’s about more than just physicality. It’s about becoming a version of yourself that feels at ease, present, calm, confident, and yes, beautiful.

I don’t know if I have a conclusion on beauty yet, but I do know that I feel more beautiful than I’ve ever felt, and it’s not because of some radical physical change, but due to an internal shift. One that has taken time, effort, and maturity to experience. I know that I’m not at the end of road with beauty. The relationship between us and our appearance is one we’re stuck with for life. It takes active management, negotiation, and effort to keep up with its evolving role. But I think my relationship with it is getting better, and that’s pretty good. I mean: all we can hope for is an upward trend, right? Getting to the finish line of most things isn’t usually the best part, anyway.

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Here’s the poem-mini-essay I was referring to. It encapsulates my feelings about beauty in the many stages of my life pretty well. TW: if talk of beauty standards, eating, body image stuff, etc. bothers you, maybe stop here :)

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Pursuing beauty always starts out innocently enough,
Small changes, gentle tweaks,
Then suddenly your body is getting smaller,
Your bones are feeling tighter against your skin,
Your waist is feeling smaller in your pants,
And you feel yourself enjoying it,
That gap between the skin and the fabric signifying some sort of,
Value delta between the you from before and the smaller you,

The bigger that gap the smaller you are,
The smaller you are the more they love you,
The more they love you the more you can do,
The more you can do the more freedom you have,

Beauty isn’t trivial,
Because beauty measures attractiveness,
And being attractive means being pursued,
Being a magnet of male attention,
The temptation of the male gaze,
An addictive and winding vortex,
That you fear being pulled into,
A gaze so seductive and intoxicating,
Because it’s how we’re told to measure our worth,

Margaret Atwood says:
You are a woman with a man inside looking at you,
You are your own voyeur,
And your voyeur knows what they want,
And won’t stop pushing you until you get there,
So it degrades the rest of your life,
Until you feel the voyeur’s ideal version of you within your grasp,
And then it gets even worse,

Why is beauty so seductive?
So all consuming and suffocating,
Its grip on our mind unrelenting,

A part of me wishes I didn’t want to be more beautiful,
A part of me enjoys watching my appearance inch closer to this ideal,
A part of me wants to stop the momentum,
And another part of me wants to tumble into the vortex,

It’s crazy how powerful the pull feels,
The pull to be more beautiful,
No matter how intellectual or cerebral you are,
You can’t outsmart the desire to be beautiful,

Beauty will sneak up on you in your most care-free moments,
And taint them for you:
“I hate those pictures, my arms look bad”
“I can’t look at those photos, my skin was breaking out”
”You can’t post those, my hair is frizzy”

So fucking what? Why do we care so much?
We’re all going to end up old and wrinkly anyway (we hope),
And yet we get on our knees and worship beauty,
Because it is the feminine ideal,

To pray to beauty is to be a woman,
Because beauty is worshipped
And we, too, want to be worshipped, admired, revered,
Untangling that hunger for pursuit is difficult,

And beauty spares no one,
It’s always painful,
Divorcing yourself from the pursuit of beauty is equally as painful as immersing yourself in it,
Whether you’re starving yourself or trying to accept yourself,
The pain persists,
Because beauty’s tumultuous tugging and pulling at us is unending,

There’s also a sense of shame in admitting you still care,
“You’re an adult now, give it a rest” you tell yourself,
And yet the vestigial obsession with your appearance still tightens,
Where you get a glimpse of the insecurities that used to control you:
Your body, your hair, your skin,
The vision of perfection flashes over your imperfections,
And it all comes rushing back,
The desperation to be beautiful, 

The world fetishizes youth,
And while no woman wants to let go of their beauty,
There’s something intriguing about having no attachment to it,
Something honourable, admirable, desirable,
About the older ladies in coffee shops,
Who don’t care what they look like,

It makes any girl wonder:
What would life look like if I didn’t care what I looked like?

I’m curious to know,
And one day I probably will,
But until then,
I’ll try to befriend beauty,
Negotiate with her,
Let her in,
Push her out,
Manage the relationship,
But not be a slave to it,
Because it’s when we’re a slave to beauty,
That our sanity wanes,
And I’m trying to unravel myself in different ways,
In ideas, in curiosity, in conversation, in thinking, in writing, 
I’m trying to unravel my mind, not my sanity,

But I know that the desire to be beautiful doesn’t go gracefully,
Like the plasticity of our skin,
It continues to strangle us if we let it,
For as long as it can survive in our psyche,

It takes time, effort, and acceptance,
To loosen beauty’s grip on our necks,
To pluck its fingers away,
One by one,
Until we can finally breathe,
Without the need,
To be beautiful 

PS—Say hi on Twitter this resonated with you, and if you enjoyed this, you might like another piece I wrote about how crushes are often just misplaced ambition.