On Beauty.

"...once a child starts to think of himself this way, it's almost impossible for the 'image'--I think that's the right word here--to be changed." ~Madeleine L'Engle

Reading this in A Circle of Quiet made me think of my own skewed self-image. I don't remember thinking much about my looks when I was little. Beauty came from the bag full of dress-up clothes my grandmother had made for my mother. I could be a green and gold sparkle belly dancer or a Shakespearean enchantress in a yellow silky nightdress.

But at some point, maybe when I was eight or so, I came to the conclusion that I was not pretty and that I probably never would be. I do remember one girl at a gymnastics class lock-in telling me that I was ugly, but I think that was the only time anything like that happened. Maybe that was enough. But the belief probably came from the fact that I looked nothing like and really was nothing like my best friend: long, blonde hair; blue eyes; quick and proportional development; eyelashy charm; and confidence. She looked incredible no matter what she was wearing or doing. I don't remember her ever having a blemish. Boys literally congregated around her. I remember her showing me a little gold and pink ring she wore on her little finger--a gift from her boyfriend.

I do fall into either-or thinking sometimes. The other person who represented beauty (grown-up beauty) for me was my mother, and I wasn't much like her either (blonde hair, brown eyes, fashion sense, poise, ease with people, skill and grace with just about anything from making paper dolls and Amish friendship bread to planting a garden). I could believe that two kinds of beauty existed: youthful and adult. But if these were pretty, and I wasn't these, what did that leave?

I wasn't conscious of this, of course. I pulled confidence from acting, from having an established circle of four friends, from being smart and writerly. But a few years ago, I was looking at a massive collection of photos my dad had sort of bequeathed to me on an external hard drive. I found photos of myself around age ten, photos I'd probably seen before but hadn't studied. I knew what I was, how I looked.

But I didn't. I think I actually gasped and said to Josh, "But I was such a pretty little girl!"

Like most people (except those sirens), I had the awful years of eleven to thirteen. But when I turned fourteen, Accutane had done battle with my monstrous acne, and my face had lost some of that pained stretched-yet-shrunken quality. I was pretty enough, at least, to kiss or hold hands with half the boys in my grade (okay, there were nine or ten of them total). Still, I thought of myself as a plain girl who had pretty moments. Though I had moved away and didn't have the constant comparison with my best friend, I still didn't think I could qualify.

By age the middle of eleventh grade, I didn't think much about appearances. I was living in mind, imagination, and paper. But I did learn that magnetism, as I saw it in my best friend, isn't just from looks. When I was wholly absorbed in being myself and enjoying that, people did notice me, even though I was attending a huge school by then. I didn't take notice then, but I remember it now. Somehow, people knew who I was--that smart girl. They sometimes watched me. One very popular and very kind girl stared at me once while I was writing in a journal, and she said, "I've never met anyone like you. I will never forget you as long as I live." I was dumbfounded.

A series of unfortunate relationships broke some of this, and one directly assured me that I was quite, quite unattractive physically and otherwise. This has gotten better. I have a husband who tells me daily that he thinks I am beautiful, and the adoration on his face shows it. If he thinks I'm beautiful, what else matters?

Well, what I think matters. I've noticed that calling anyone pretty or beautiful is not really proper for adults (apparently) unless we link it to a change or object: "You look so pretty in that jacket!" for example. I think I do collect these: one person saying I look great in glasses, one person astonished and impressed when seeing me with my hair in a ponytail for the first time, one person repeatedly complimented my hair when I curled it, people saying I dress well (that's new). Do we really look at people? I, for one, would probably not say, "You're really beautiful" because, well, don't beautiful people know they're beautiful?

I don't know. This little girl didn't think she was beautiful. I wish I could tell her that she was.