What is Beauty?

??? ?? ??? Friday,

This time last week, Corey and I were departing two indulgent weeks in Hawaii, where we took turns giving each other pep talks that despite everything happening in our lives, we deserved to enjoy ourselves. At one point he made a joke about me wearing my one relatively conservative bikini from high school (purchased more than 20 years ago... it's held up well because although I grew up on the Jersey Shore, I can hardly swim and am terrified of the ocean) which was less of a disparaging remark about me or my body and more about my fashion choice for the occasion. Perhaps to prove a point, I announced to him that I would buy a new, cheeky bikini at the next surf shop we saw.

A few hours later we were inside Volcom at the Shops at Wailea in Maui. I immediately got distracted looking at baby shirts for my nephew and so Corey wandered outside to find someplace to sit. I picked out two bottoms and two tops from a wall of face-outs containing mix/match separates, and asked the (male) sales associate about sizing. He insisted I just try them on, but I instinctually refused because I've avoided dressing rooms almost as well as I've avoided buying bathing suits since high school. (The last time I was in a dressing room, the Nordstrom sales associate cried out "OH YOUR WHOLE LOOK EATS" and as I headed in to change while simultaneously looking up what that meant so I could bask privately in the glow of their compliment, I caught a glimpse in the mirror that a tiny bit of the crooked, keloided laparotomy scar on my belly was showing. I yelled over the door that 'OH THE MIRROR IN HERE IS SO GOOD' and I didn't need to come out into the bigger, less private mirror in the better light.) At Volcom, a brand I have no particular feeling towards, I bought not one but two different bikinis in different sizes, reconciling that I could afford my fear-induced wastefulness since I had bought so few bikinis prior.

Say all that to say, it dawned on me in the store and for the rest of the trip that I need to reset my definition of beauty in order to attempt any type of relationship with it, and confidence. Unintentionally, my husband's remark made me realize that I had crystallized an idea of beauty in high school, and likely judged that I no longer had any shot at meeting my own definition in college, when I had my first two abdominal surgeries, first started having bowel issues, first started hiding my lumpy stomach (and myself), and -ironically- first started being exposed to more people who look like me. Much, much later when I started working in venture, I would tell others that I love all things B2C brand but please, anything except for beauty. I would watch friends, colleagues, classmates and even my dearest Corey find themselves somewhat tangential to the GOOP-sphere, and inside I would cringe out of anticipation that they would discover that I will never be that, and inevitably reject me.

But what, exactly, is that? What is beauty?

This week I plopped myself down to journal and found that it was sooo much easier to write a list of things that make me feel NOT-beautiful, than it was to think of things that make me feel beautiful. So I started there, and sort of reverse engineered my way to the positive, in hopes of forming a definition of my own.

Not-Beauty:

1. When I hug/make eye contact/share an intimate moment with someone much shorter than me, I feel like an ogre.
2. When I pick my cuticles and notice I’m doing so but can’t stop until my fingers are a bloody mess and there's a pile of skin chips on the floor, and I still haven't solved the thought exercise that kick started the picking in the first place, I feel like a failure.
3. When I see a picture of my mangled abdomen or catch it in a mirror, when my stomach growls in a 1:1 conversation and I see the energy it takes the other person to pretend not to notice,?when I feel compelled to edit a photo of myself before sharing it, I feel embarrassed.
4. When I smell my own BO before/during/after I'm around other people, I feel disgusting.
5. When I’m constipated and I sit on the toilet for so long that my legs fall asleep, and I have to steady myself on the counter to shimmy over to wash my hands, I feel... shitty.

Beauty:

1. When someone looks me in the eye and tells me something I did/said/wrote made them feel seen, encouraged or welcome in the world, I feel both wise and connected.
2. (Back when I was studying data science at Berkeley) When my lines of code finally run with no errors, I get the answer I've been looking for or the plot renders the way I think it should, and I arrive extremely late to the social activity I've overcommitted myself to, I feel whatever the opposite of FOMO is.
3. When I walk my dog first thing in the morning on the brightest of sunny days in nyc and I am met with a rapid succession of all kinds of diverse people saying hello, flirting, feeding off my energy, I feel defiantly hopeful like "Belle" in that Beauty and the Beast scene and song of the same name.
4. When I feel my shaved head on the pillow, when I feel the breeze on my scalp after so many years of effectively wearing a thick sweater up there at all times, when I shower and am out the door in less than 10 minutes, I am reminded of that day earlier in the pandemic when my brother first shaved my head in the backyard of my mom's house and I feel free.
5. When I’m held really, really TIGHT, even (or especially) by my dog Copper, I feel coveted and seen.
6. When someone sees me out of the corner of their eye and calls me sir, but then looks up and gets confused and instead of replacing 'sir' with 'ma'am' (because I don't really recognize myself in either of these titles), simply says, "OH! I'M SORRY I CALLED YOU SIR AND I LOVE YOUR TATTOOS, WHAT'S YOUR NAME?" I feel seen and friendly.

But, still, what is beauty?

Even after making these lists, I still needed inspiration from others before attempting my own definition. So this week's Friday Five is a curation of just that, with my own (always WIP) perspective at the end. Do you have a working definition of beauty? I'd love if we all offered more alternatives to the "beauty" "industry" "standard."

"Beauty is a commitment to meeting yourself, over and over, as many times as it takes. A commitment to creating community with the many aspects of self that converge within us, and challenging the status quo of the identities impressed upon us by the external. It is a promise to see yourself even when it brings you discomfort to look. To hold admiration and reverence for yourself, even when the world tells us that doing so should feel painful. It is the rejection of our being as a blueprint controlled by others, and the recognition of it as a significant social and political tool to give voice to the many binaries that make up who each of us are." -- Gee, Excerpted from 01 OCT 2021 post on Instagram @theladiesfirst.

"Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting; the self forgetting of seeing, hearing, smelling or touching that erases our separation, our distance, our fear of the other. Beauty invites us, through entrancement, to that fearful, frontier between what we think makes us; and what we think makes the world. Beauty is almost always found in symmetries: the symmetries seen out in creation, the wings of the moth, the airy sky and the solid earth, the restful, focused eyes of a loving face in which we see our own self reflected: the symmetry also, therefore, of bringing together inner and outer recognitions, the far horizon of otherness seen in that face joined to the deep inner horizon of our own being. Beauty is an inner and an outer complexion living in one face." --David Whyte, Excerpted from ‘BEAUTY’ in CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

"I believe that we invest the sky with the spiritual--we are only able to invest the sky with the spiritual--because while we are primarily ensconced in a finite existence, we do experience at least a taste of the infinite. When we think about our self, our soul--whatever you want to call it--we intuitively sense that we aren’t fully limited to the bodily, that there is something more to us. That is what makes us look to the sky, or to the spiritual space more generally. If we were entirely finite, it wouldn’t occur to us to look to the realm of the infinite. If we were entirely infinite, we wouldn’t need to look to it. It is because of our middle position, our being caught between heaven and earth, that we are moved to usher the sacred into our lives." --Finnegan Shepard, Excerpted from 'TEMPLE' in LIMNS, a monthly curation of thought and image.

"I feel beautiful when I sit patiently inside a big question mark and don’t fix or change or force anything. Remember my original point about how trying to stop time is a way of not really living? Well, living in uncertainty and being patient with it and learning from it are all ways of welcoming reality (and mystery, and passion, and sadness, and joy!) into your arms. When you do that — when you make space for the terror and exuberance of life on our planet at this particular hour — you (sometimes!) relax into a new feeling of peace and acceptance and love for all of the deeply imperfect people around you, including yourself." --Heather Havrilesky, Excerpted from 'LOOKING VS. FEELING BEAUTIFUL' in ASK POLLY

After all that, here's what I offer:

Beauty is (the process of) assertion. Specifically, the feeling of flow when some alignment first clicks into place between the inner experience and outer performance of oneself. Then, the expression of that alignment being thrust into an already-dynamic setting, like the moment a Double Dutch jump roper seamlessly moves into the eye of the synchronized-but-oppositely-turning ropes. But rather than tangling the ropes, this assertion amplifies the energetic balance of it all. The revolutions get faster, but the space between them appears calm, allowing everyone present to simultaneously enjoy the dance of the Double Dutch player, and feel for a moment that they could move like that too, that they could prove themselves wrong, that they could have what they want at nothing or no one else's expense, especially their own.

Beauty is mutual, expansive, infinite-sum assertion. -- that's what I'm going with, for now.