So I have an appointment to get my nails done tomorrow, like I do every few weeks, an hour or so dedicated to covering my nails in plastic and some combination of glitter and flowers/stars. I guess they look kinda crazy...and yes probably kinda chavy, I acknowledge they aren't the classiest look, but without them, I feel, in an unexplainable way, less of myself.
Psychologies magazine has just published their new Positive Beauty Manifesto which aims to make women appreciate their own individual beauty and challenge society's narrow definition of what is appealing to the eye. This got me thinking about the subject of beauty, about what it is, how you get it and how society defines it.
I don't go around thinking 'I'm beautiful, oh wow, I look so amazing today' but neither do I think of myself as not beautiful. When I catch sight of myself in a window cycling in a ridiculous helmet with a puffy red face I feel as far from beautiful as you can get....but still, looking that way bedraggled and uncoiffered, unglamourous and unfeminine I'd still disagree with anyone's right to say that I was anything other than beautiful. I hate, hate, hate that we as a society feel we have the right to comment on other people's beauty or perceived lack of it. Sure, I might look at a gossip magazine and say 'why is she wearing that god-awful dress?!' but I would never look at someone in a magazine and say 'she's so ugly'. Perhaps because I've lived my life in a body that society deems unattractive I have an instinctual opposition to the word 'ugly' or to anyone who is arrogant enough to think they have the right to rate someone else's beauty.
I use the word beauty here rather than attractiveness. We all have certain looks that appeal to us, I can recognise that Brad Pitt is conventionally attractive, but he does nothing for me (well maybe in that Irish film where he had the floppy fringe!!) and that's not a negative comment towards him, it's just personal preference. I don't think there is anything insulting about not finding someone attractive, because everyone is attractive to someone, everyone. I have learnt this through the internet and the annoying amount of men who contact me because they are into BBW (big beautiful women). Personally I don't think it's appealing for a bloke to be entirely focused on your appearance, regardless of whether it's for your long slim legs or your fat butt, but anyway I'm going off on a tangent, what I'm trying to say is that attractiveness is not the same as beauty, one can be part of the other of course, but they aren't dependent upon each other.
But after all this rambling I haven't got any closer to defining what beauty actually is! I read a book back in my rampant feminist days (I'm still a feminist, but I don't use it as reason to hate anymore!) called 'The Face of Love: Feminism and the Beauty Question' which concluded:
'To see beauty as the face of love rather than the arbitrary gift of fortune is to enlarge our sense of life's possibilities.'
It basically argued that women become beautiful when they act out of love, love for the world and love for themselves and when who they are on the inside is reflected on the outside. It was a very long book that posed a lot of other theories and I don't remember any of them, but that one description has always stuck with me, the idea that beauty comes from an attitude, a sense of peace with oneself and love for the experience of life. I've tried to find other definitions but none of them seem as true to me as this one.
I don't promote obesity, but in one regard I think being the shape that I am has been a blessing. When the world says you are ugly, you have 3 options: crawl into a ball and cry, spend your life trying to become a version of beautiful the world accepts, or decide the world is wrong and work hard to develop a sense of your own worth that isn't determined by outside opinion. I'm not going to claim that I feel beautiful every day or that I look in the mirror and go 'wow look at you', but I do try to be gentle on myself. I have so many friends who are are incredibly cruel to themselves, who use words to describe their own amazing, individual bodies that I would never utter about my worst enemy. I find it so, so sad. In a world where we as women fight for the right to not be judged on our appearance, we judge ourselves in the worst possible ways. Why? What have our bodies ever done to deserve such hatred? In some ways my body is more amazing than one belonging to a person who stays in shape, because my body still keeps going, after all that's thrown at it, the junk that's put into it, the struggles I force upon it, it still keeps going....it defies belief really and I am not about to hate it.
So back to beauty and love! As I've got older (in my 30's now, time for my pension soon...although when I retire the pension age will probably be 75!) , I feel I've become more myself, I feel I've come to accept who I am and to understand that the judgements of others are not worth more than my own judgement (we shouldn't ignore criticism, there can be valid points in it, but I think we know instinctually if there is truth in the criticism being made). The clothes I choose to wear, the flat shoes I choose to walk through life in, the ridiculously glittery nails I choose to have painted, I don't choose them because they are beautiful, I choose them because they feel like 'me'. I didn't have my nails done for several years because of backpacking and finances but the day I walked back into the nail salon to get them reapplied, the smell of the acrylic, the whirring of the electric files, it felt un-explainably right, like home, like me. And when I look at myself in the mirror now, that's what I feel, I feel I look like myself - big rings and purple glasses, wrist tattoos and a Jane Seymour necklace, troll bead bracelet and Birkenstocks, no make-up and some small wisps of hair, big smile and lips a beautician once told me women would kill for ('Um OK!') and that's fine with me, because I think 'me' is an OK person, a work in progress sure, but nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hate. So really, truly, please let's stop hating ourselves, or trying in vain to become a inferior version of conventional beauty, when we could be an outstanding version of our own beauty, our own selves. Take a photograph of someone laughing, really, truly, laughing, uncontrollably, uninhibited, free, they can't fail to look beautiful, full of life, full of joy. Beauty is the face of love, love of who you are, love of life, love of others....without question it's a struggle to embody that love, but lets be gentle with ourselves, and each other, in the process.
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