365 Days Of Love. Day 150

I find that I am frequently reminding myself that beauty isn’t determined by size 0 pants, long legs, and a va-voom rack. Growing up, I struggled to ever appreciate the way I looked, I felt like the ugly duckling of my friends. I have a single mole under my left eye and for the longest time that was the only quality about myself that I liked.

I’m partially grateful for these feelings because they forced me to internally cultivate a person that I was satisfied with. I joined a club soccer team, organized a fundraiser for a friend’s family, and worked hard in school. These things led to opportunities and adventures that I’m profoundly grateful for. What bothers, me, though, about these negative feelings toward myself, is that there seems to always be a nagging voice in my head saying,

“You could be skinnier, your butt is too big and your boobs are too small, your face would benefit from a nose job, and your hair resembles brown bushes in the height of a drought.”

Most times, I can refute the voice with promises of working out more or eating less or buying the newest hair product to tame my mane, but such promises only act as a Band-Aid. Such promises don’t actually promise anything beneficial, they don’t promise a re-definition of beauty. So, the nagging voice remains, sometimes softly and sometimes screaming. The nagging voice is always present.

In my attempt to define love per the past 150 (plus) days, I’ve briefly considered beauty as well. I feel the most beautiful when I am being most loving. I wear less makeup; I take less time to get ready when I’m doing something that is truly soul-satisfying.

What is beauty?

Per the persistently present nagging voice, the voice that is never satisfied, the voice that simply seeks a degree of immeasurable physical portions, beauty is an unreachable, indefinable figment of my (our) media-influenced minds. That’s not satisfying, though. That’s neither attainable nor desirable, really. What is the point of pursuing something that I (we) will never be? Beauty has to be something more. Something like love, something that takes years to figure out, something incomprehensible, something that we are innately, but have tried too hard for too long to repress. Beauty has to be what inherently lies in the intricacies of humanity, the thick bonds of one to another.

Beauty is love and love is human.