*the following is my personal essay for Honors writing. It's main point is not to be funny, but I think it was an important element from my life. Enjoy mis amores!
The
Day I Realized Beautiful
Would you like to
play a game? It’s called High school. The rules are always changing, the dice
are always loaded, and grades, friends, teachers, popularity, --pretty much
every component of high school-- can be leveraged by playing your cards right.
Some
strategize in favor of a personable attitude. Others make use of knowing
exactly when the teacher is and is not going to check for homework. The elite
few wear the SBO sweater “get out of jail free” card to leave class early.
There are all kinds of hands you can
play but half way through high school, I realized that in the game of life,
“pretty” is an ace in the deck.
You should
probably know that I was raised blind. Not literally (although that would have
made a fantastic narrative) but figuratively in that I didn’t pay much
attention to beauty. My elementary school class had basically the same 26 kids
from kindergarten to sixth grade, so by the time we were aware of, or placed
any kind of importance on physical beauty, we knew each other well enough to
get judged on it.
Consequently, junior high was a
whirlwind of girls stowing lip-gloss into their trainer bras, guys sporting
high end basketball shoes, and enough cheap cologne in the hallway to
intoxicate a small whale. It was a materialistic side of life that I had been
relatively underexposed to. Luckily however, I found a group of girlfriends who
didn’t put too much stock into the “pretty” complex, so neither did I.
Freshman.
Sophomore. It was junior year in high school. My small circle of girlfriends
had eventually expanded to the typical guys-and-girls group, and as luck would
have it, we got some of the more popular boys. I was sitting next to three of
them (due to the lucky guy-heavy class list that every girl prays for) the day
I realized pretty.
My A.P. English teacher had put in a
documentary for us to watch and analyze the ethos, pathos, and logos presented
in the film. I sat at my three-guys-one-girl table taking notes, when my ears
heard something that my eyes would never forget.
Trevor: Dude, why
are they interviewing your girlfriend?
A chorus of male
voices chanted the testosterone-specific “ohhhhhhhh” in recognition of a good
diss.
Mark: well where’s
yours? That fat chick in the yellow dress. I think you’re going to have to buy
a bigger car, cause I don’t think she’ll fit in your Subaru.
Trevor: Yeah
right, like I’d ever date her. I’d have to be blind. And retarded. And don’t
pretend like you didn’t think the chick in the yellow dress wasn’t hot. We all
know you had a thing with Samantha Jameson in 6th grade.
Mark: oh man. She
was obsessed with me. She like stalked me.
James: Yeah.
Remember when she drew a picture of you guys kissing in her planner and someone
found it?
Mark: that was so
creepy. And how she wears those cat ears?
Trevor: I think
she’s trying to seduce you, man. She uses about a pound of make-up.
James: I hate it
when girls do that. It’s so ugly!
Trevor: Except
Kimmy. She (he gave a meaningful look) can definitely
pull it off.
There were
affirmative grunts and knowing head nods.
Mark: Don’t tell
me you’re cheating on that girl on the movie. I think she wanted to take you
out for a hamburger later.
Trevor: more like
a triple cheeseburger. Eating it would probably be her exercise for the day.
They all laughed
so I guess, to them, it was a joke. Just another way to sit through 89 minutes
of repetitive interviews and poor back lighting, but to me it was the first
time that beauty had really struck me as an indispensable characteristic of
acceptance. I suddenly felt self-conscious, trying to work the puzzle pieces of
the information they had just given me into a picture of self-awareness. I began to wonder if I was too ugly or
too fat or too anything else to be liked, or even accepted by the guy-friends
who were so critical of the girls in their two dimensional world.
From then on out, I listened closely
for some other criteria on which they judged girls, but ultimately, all they
would talk about was “pretty.”
I tuned in more
closely to my girlfriends as well, and began to notice that 99% of the
compliments they gave were related to some aspect of “pretty,” and how most of
the insecurities they expressed, even jokingly, were about being ugly or
undesirable.
Between the physical critiques of
girls from my guy friends, and the incessant appearance-chatter form my girlfriends;
I slowly began to decipher, and eventually speak the language of “pretty”
The Language of
pretty is similar to English, except that instead of the most common word being
“The” or “A” the most common word in the language of pretty is “than.” Dick is
better looking THAN Jane. Jane is uglier THAN Dick. See Dick smile. See Jane
try to impress Dick with her charming personality, but it doesn’t work because
Dick is too consumed with beauty and doesn’t notice anyone without a small nose
and naturally high cheekbones.
The other main
difference between English and “pretty” is the use of suffixes. The most common
suffixes in English are probably “ed” or “ing.” (RunnING, smilING, laughING,
listenED, pardonED, attendED.) The most common suffixes in Pretty are “er” and
“est” (loveliER, cutER, bettER, prettiEST, hottEST, happiEST,)
My speech became
so polluted with speaking “pretty” around my friends, that it’s the language I
began to think in. My mind was saturated in THANs, ERs and ESTs. Compliments
became the currency for my self-esteem, and I eventually adopted the standard I
so hated.
Obviously I
realize now that this was an unacceptably shallow, flawed, and harmful way to
establish self-awareness, but when everything is about the way you SEE things,
you paradoxically become more and more short-SIGHTED.
In retrospect, I
think I compare my former thought process to this analogy. If you base your
happiness on how many elephants you own, then you’ll never be happy because
elephants aren’t legal pets in America. It’s the same concept with beauty. It’s
just ridiculous to base your happiness on something you will never achieve. And
that doesn’t really matter much or make sense anyway.
Being immersed in
the culture of pretty was exhausting. There is always someone prettier THAN
you. You are never the cutEST female on the premises. And in the culture, if
either of these things are true, you are deemed by default lessER than someone
else, and consequently more unhappy.
Unhappy.
A side effect of
living in the pretty.
When your mind has
marinated in “pretty” sewage for so long, it’s hard to be anything but unhappy
and discontent.
But then came the
day I realized Beautiful. A catalytic moment that I can’t even put my finger
on. It wasn’t a specific event, or cutesy Young Women’s quote on matchy-matchy
paper, it was just the day that I began to see how beautiful things could be
when they weren’t pretty.
A garbage pile in
a museum titled “Future,” a necessary but painful truth, a fast food worker who
took pride in his job, a laugh that sounded like someone was sawing a log.
These were all encompassed in the realm of Beautiful, and yet contradicted the
standards of “pretty.”
As my standard for
the world shifts from pretty to beautiful, my standard for people is too. It
adds so many components to someone’s worth other than how attractive they are.
Intelligence, kindness, compassion, hilarity, honesty, creativity,
determination, endurance, generosity, humility…a whole new side of life is
introduced.
Sometimes I get
frustrated with myself for ever having entered the “pretty” culture. It was
such a waste of life, and I was so unhappy that I often wish that I could do my
junior and senior years all over again. But then I remember how much joy,
personal growth, and value I get from deciding
to step out of the pretty. My pathway through pretty prompted me to consciously
choose which characteristics are important to me, and to actively seek to find
the good qualities in others that might not be apparent at first glance.
Maybe this is why
there’s a pretty culture in the first place. Because no one wants the arduous
task of finding out who people really are. They simply collect the visible data
most readily available to them and base their opinions on that.
Honestly, I’m
still finding out what true beauty is. I know a lot about what it’s not. It’s
not big baby-blue eyes, or a flat stomach, or naturally dark eyelashes. But as
to what it IS, I’m still not sure. What I do know is that it manifests itself differently in each person.
It’s just harder to see than what you see.
