I Wonder If I Will Ever See Myself As Beautiful

Beautiful was a word with which I did not associate myself. On the other hand, words like intelligent, smart, well-educated had always been my allies. Growing up, I had never heard the word “beautiful” come up when I was being discussed. As a precocious pre-teen, I soon learned to avoid discussions about natural beauty. I had naturally accepted my lot with the “intelligent” girls and I was happy with that. After all, my 12-year-old brain had convinced me that beautiful girls were not as important as the intelligent ones. It wasn’t as though I was explicitly told that I was ugly or not pretty. Quite the opposite, my mother had always insisted that I was a pretty child, with beautiful, big eyes. It’s just that I never felt beautiful.

Beauty Lies In The Eyes Of The Beholder

It is said that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder but the people whom I considered beautiful looked nothing like me. So, how could I consider myself beautiful? Suddenly, I grew up and my pre-teen brain was taken over by the teenage brain. All my self-confidence, the belief that I was worth something gradually eroded. Instead, it was replaced by self-doubt and shame. Shame at the way my body was ballooning day-by-day, shame at the way my chest had begun to become heavy. It felt like I was becoming a monster, a monster devoid of shape and structure. Every time I would walk in the school halls, I would wonder if everyone could see how ugly I have become. To top it all, my friends were not undergoing similar changes. In fact, they looked better than before. It was hard for me to look at the mirror and not feel grossed out by what I saw. Forget beautiful I did not even think of myself as normal.

This phase went on for a couple of years and I made peace with myself. Gradually, I shed all the extra weight that I had gained during puberty and began to look recognizable again. But even then, I was as far from being beautiful as I could be, at least in my own eyes.

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall, Am I Fair At All?

It was not entirely my fault that I did not consider myself beautiful. Wherever I looked, there were beautiful women. These women were in ads, movies, books, newspapers – everywhere. They did not even have a single blemish; their waists were perfect, and they had a lustrous mane. They even had the elusive thigh gap. When compared to these models of divinity, I felt immeasurably small. My nose was too big. My hair had a mind of its own. My waist just about managed to enclose itself in the boundary of my jeans. You see, everything was wrong.

In fact, I believed that no boy could ever fall in love with my shapeless body and my dusky complexion. It was beyond my imagination that I could be the object of someone’s desire. I did not believe that I could ever elicit desire.

I avoided the mirror’s gaze, and whenever I gathered the courage to look at it, all I could see were faults. Every inch of me is forced to undergo the close scrutiny of my inner critic. It is this critic who never lets me be happy with the way I am. It is this critic who is so hard to please. It does not matter to the inner critic that my body is capable of its own miracles. It knows how to toil for a hard day’s work, it carries me through the pain. These aspects of my body and my inner beauty are of no value to this inner critic. How can I be beautiful then?
Is it even possible for me to be beautiful?

Maybe One Day…

Maybe, one day, my inner critic will be silenced and will finally accept me for who I am. I wish I could teach it to love my little faults rather than mocking them. Hard as it is, it is quite possible to teach it the concept of self-love, to teach it to be a little more forgiving towards those fat rolls on my tummy and those bags beneath my eyes. To make it understand that those dark circles are a result of a hard night’s work. And those big ears have a pixie-ish charm.

It would help if I found women like me around in the media and television. It would help if every face that was showcased on the billboards had its own blemishes. It would help if we were not running after outer beauty and it would help if our real selves were celebrated. Though it seems like a far-fetched dream, it just might happen and when it does, I believe I will finally see myself as beautiful.

Have you ever wondered the same? Do you feel what I feel? Answer in the comments below.

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