Tell Me I'm Beautiful

I have always wanted to be beautiful.  I don't mean cute or occasionally well cleaned-up or looking pretty nice by association of the other lovely people who are also in the Facebook picture at that fancy wedding.  I mean, externally, luminously, superficially beautiful.  I have never been that girl.

I've always been smart, "nice" (worst word ever), kind, the girl you'd want in your group for class because you'd definitely get an A.  The girl you can ask, "Hey, how do you spell that again?" or "I'm in a tough space in life and I don't know what to do."  These are not undesirable characteristics, and universe, please know that I am grateful.  However, from age zero until age now, I've always looked intelligent (this is the universal code for nerdy), friendly, unassuming, non-offensive, practically invisible.  Glasses (usually not even cool ones), braces, boring hair -- average, or maybe worse: not even noticeable enough to be average.  Occasionally cute.  "Cute" might be worse than being invisible (although, a toss-up for worse than "nice").  It's kind of this patronizing way to be told you're adorable-in-a-child-or-furry-animal sort of way, and that you're putting up a good fight, but that you're not the real deal.  You're not glamorous or striking or sensual or a real woman.

Nobody ever called me pretty.  Not then, not now.  Instead, I was all the words that women have battled for, for centuries, begged to be called.  Seen not for what they seem but for what they are.  I understand that there are women ALL OVER the world, beautiful, captivating women, who fight, scream, advocate for their legitimacy in existence to be for what they think and what they do rather than for how they appear, or for how their lives are (poorly) valued in accordance with only what they look like.  They would sell body parts -- and do -- demanding education, a strong, heard voice, cerebral equality.  Listen.  I know this.  Reminding myself of it only makes me feel worse about posting this, which it should, you say.  I know.  But I have always guiltily wished, secretly pleaded, that someone would skip past my good vocabulary and literary references and just find me lovely.  Shallowly, plainly radiant.  This has never happened.  I know, you say, this is dumb, you say . . . what is wrong with you.  I don't know.  I know I'm lucky for people to find me fascinating once they open me up.  But I want them for once to not have to do the digging and the work; I want them to be able to be lazy and just look at me and find me beautiful.  The kind of low-level mental processing that doesn't require any cognitive effort, any mental scripts telling you that she's beautiful because she's triumphed an emotional battlefield or helps special needs kids or could write your college essays for you blindfolded.  What I am about to say is completely inappropriate and I don't care: I want to get in on the unjust luxury that women have enjoyed for all of time, to be admired just for being something people like looking at.

I guess it's false to say it never happens.  You know who calls me pretty?  Older people.  Not older people as in creepy old guys, thank God.  But older women -- 40s, 50s, 60s.  Aunts, female neighbors, friends' mothers.  They tell me I'm pretty in a quaint, grandmotherly sort of way.  And I do appreciate it, I do.  I kind of feel like they think everybody's pretty though, you know?  I kind of want someone to feel that, about me, and maybe NOT about everybody else, without having to think it.  And I also sometimes feel like it's easy for them to say those kinds of things, because they're not sitting here in flannel pajamas at midnight alone crying into a keyboard putting their gross hair into a ponytail and feeling like maybe if they'd washed it today, maybe they wouldn't be in this position.  (Which, clearly, I would never do.)

Who are you, you say, and what have you done with my feminist friend?  Accurate.  This is something that really does not often come out of my mouth.  And yes, I'm a little bit ashamed to be saying it.  But I think it, I feel it.  You know?  I can't help it.  Maybe it's only socialization that's convinced me this is missing.  Maybe it's just stripped humanity.  Don't wait for someone to tell you you're beautiful, you say . . . tell yourself.  Yes, okay.  That's delightful.  I will do that.  While I'm reminding myself how shitty I am to say something like this while women remain second-class global citizens and I sit here in all my first-world snotty privilege.  I know.  I get it.  Not cool.  This will not go down as one of my prouder blog posts.  (Although, nothing will top the wrath I incurred after the "Settling" entry, so, do not despair, fair audience, I doubt I'll be that hated again!)  I suppose the best move for me right now would be to go procure a mirror, a nice self-help book to read a chapter aloud from, and a cup of hot tea.  Instead, I'll probably resume my book on microlending to women in Africa, finish my glass of wine, and avoid all mirrors on my way back to my bed, due to the unconfirmed but aforementioned rat's nest ponytail and "nice" pajamas and "cute" bunny slippers . . . a beautiful picture.

Hey -- I'm Done Being Sorry.

One of my good friends was in counseling in college.  And I remember her telling me that her therapist’s bottom line to her was: Stop apologizing.  Stop saying you’re sorry all the time, for everything.  And I remember thinking, shit, I do that ALL the time.  Apologizing when someone else bumps into me.  Apologizing when someone chooses to hold the door for me but I've rushed to catch it and ridiculously felt like I've inconvenienced them.  Apologizing when someone else was late, but I was early.    Apologizing when what I really should mean is, “You should be apologizing to me.”

Okay people.  I’m done saying I’m sorry.  And I’m done being sorry.  For shit I don’t have to be sorry for.

Let me explain.  And if you don’t like me, or don’t like my unapologies, or find it unacceptable that I’m putting this on the internet, here is your disclaimer: close this window now.  Because shit’s about to get real.

I’m not sorry for growing up with a family of whom I’m not proud.  My dad was extremely emotionally abusive, and this has only somewhat subsided since I counted the minutes until I turned 18 and moved to a different state.  I used to wish he’d just hit me (harder, with visible wounds) so that people would see and believe my invisible emotional pain.  I used to wish I could hide a tape recorder in the walls: him screaming, years upon years, “You bitch, I never want to see you again;” “I wish you were never born;” “How would you like to be put up for adoption?!  For me to make you go live with another family?!”  He’d make me sit in a chair for hours, while he stood over me, just silently glaring at me with fury for things I didn’t even know I’d done.  I used to wish I’d just get cancer or heart disease so somebody would validate the abyss in which I was floating, being dragged, at the hands but mostly words of a controlling, authoritarian, manipulative man.  My mom became an alcoholic, receding into her own fenced lair of marital denial and parental avoidance.  Never once did she raise her voice to him for my sister and me, other than her fleeing-to-another-room tears, to counter my father’s retribution on my sister and me of his own abusive childhood.  I will never be sorry for becoming a woman with assertion, a voice that will be heard, a refusal to kneel to a man’s word or world.  I used to scream at him growing up in defense of my mom or my little sister, and he’d hit me, and I’d keep screaming for them, even though no one screamed for me.  I’m not sorry that I laid in my bed day after afternoon after night, stoning my corporeal body not to convulsedly sob, but wondering if I swallowed every Tylenol on our bathroom shelf, if I could quietly die and rid myself of this pain.  I am not sorry for feeling all of this, and for re-feeling it now, or for telling you.

I’m not sorry for being an incredible student, for earning a full scholarship to a really fucking expensive prep school, for braining myself out of this hole.  I’m not sorry for being quiet in high school, studious, supremely likable if unpersonality-ed.  I’m not sorry for taking out a shit-ton of student loans to leave Pennsylvania and go as far away as I could manage, and even though Cleveland might not be paradise, I remember my family crying as they drove away from John Carroll’s campus, and not feeling anywhere close to tears.  I remember smiling, except for thinking of my younger sister, who was stuck back in that hell.  I’m not sorry about that feeling, but I’m sorry about leaving her.  It still haunts me every day.

I’m not sorry for screwing around in college, for embracing my new freedom and finding my wings (and pitfalls).  I’m not sorry for staying up late or for skipping class or for gallavanting with boys.  I’m not sorry for waiting until marriage until definitely not waiting until marriage.  I’m not sorry for becoming scary liberal Catholic, un-Catholic, and then sort-of, quantum physics, pick-and-choose Catholic.  I’m not sorry for being honors program, campus ministry, student service award kid.

Which then quickly transitioned into: can’t go to class, clinically depressed, cannot even begin to assess my life kind of kid.  I failed out of every single class my last two years.  I didn’t leave my dorm room for weeks, except to occasionally beeline to the campus counseling center, praying not to be seen or addressed in my running in my sweatpants there.  I hid from everything.  If I couldn’t champion it, I would avoid it.  The Ph.D. head of our counseling center told me that in his 15 years of therapy, my father was the most pathological person he’d ever seen.  In related news, my sister’s therapist at the University of Pittsburgh was concurrently telling her the exact same thing.  Funny how the universe aligns.  Six years later, I pulled myself through the last few classes I needed to graduate.  It was everything I thought I’d never be.  I’d never been more ashamed.  I remain never having been more ashamed.  And I’m not sorry about it.

I’m not sorry for struggling with my emotional pain, for scurrying to find a job, for ending up spending my days with kids with special needs, if only because at first I couldn’t find a job, but eventually because I have told myself (and continue to tell myself) that every child will do well when they can.  And perhaps I can’t undo some of the shit that happened to me.  But maybe I can tell a kid, without words, that what he’s going through is okay, and even if he doesn’t know what that means, maybe I can just sit next to him and help him fight it out.  And maybe sometimes I hate it, and maybe sometimes it’s really fucking hard.  And maybe sometimes it’s this cruel twist of fate, because I wish someone, anyone, in my childhood had sat next to me and said, “Hey…I don’t really get it, but I’m going to walk with you through it.”  And there are times when that is really hard for me to reconcile.  But you know what?  I’m not sorry.

I’m not sorry for pursuing boys.  For being decisive on who I like, and why, and doing something about it.  I’m not sorry for not waiting silently for a fucking awesome guy to approach me, because, guess what, I’m approaching him first.  And if a guy has a problem with that, we’re probably not going to work out.  I’m not sorry for holding out hope that someday, some guy will say to me, “Hey…I don’t really get it, but I’m going to walk with you through it.”  And I’ll need him to hold me, and breathe with me, and love me, but I won’t need him to save me, because I’m saving myself.  And I’m not sorry about it.  I’m not sorry for volunteering at the Rape Crisis Center, because keeping women strong and empowered and unashamed and unapologetic is essential to me.  I’m not sorry for tutoring a million hours a week, in order to have a place of my own, a life of which I’m proud, and an autonomy (read: lack of dependence) for which a monetary price is a silly absurdity.  I’m not sorry for not settling into a relationship or a marriage, because I will never, ever agree to be with a man who I find unworthy or who I don’t find strong enough to ask to sit with my pain.  I’m not sorry for thinking and reading and processing and synthesizing and asserting.  Someday I’ll get my life together and go to grad school, but I haven’t gotten there yet, probably because I keep apologizing to myself for my own uncertainties and insecurities and inabilities and inadequacies.  Note to self: work on that one.

I’m not sorry for making it my life’s mission to learn other people’s stories.  If I’ve met you, I want to know your entire life history.  I want you to tell me everything, and I want you to know that I’ll keep it in confidence, but the thing that lights me on fire and keeps me alive is the glowing, emblazoned heat of everyone’s story.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  Maybe because underneath, I yearn for someone to just ask me for mine, and then sit with it, and hold it, and tell me that my story is okay, and that they want to sit next to me anyway.  Aside: this hasn’t happened yet, at least intimately, at least lasting.  I want to write two books, of people’s stories, totally incompatible with each other, and one of which I’ll probably have to use a pseudonym for.  One’s about autism and one’s about sexuality.  Sorry, Mom and Dad.  Or not.

I’m not sorry for loving and losing the one person (man) who accepted me through all my pain.  I’m not sorry for continuing to mourn the loss of the only relationship who never abandoned me; until he did.  He found someone else who was less injured, or, at least took out less of her injury on him.  And there is the one thing I actually am sorry for: for ever placing my emotional pain onto anyone else.  And then finding myself even more alone than I was in the first place.

So I guess I lied.  I am sorry for one thing.  And that is for any moment where my own pain translated into my unkindness to another.  I feel it in my soul the second it leaves my body, and I shrivel a little bit inside.  If I could make one wish to the universe right this second, it would be that I would never harm anyone else because of being harmed.  I can’t guarantee that this won’t happen.  But I want it to go on the record that if it does, that is the one thing for which I will eternally be really, completely sorry.

But for everything else: I’m not sorry.  One of my best friends was listening to my whining about a boy the other day.  I told her, “You know what?  I realize I like the really intense boys.  The boys who are wild and passionate and stand for something and aren’t afraid.  The boys who have a history and a reflection and a spark.” And she said to me, “Alexandra, you like them because it is what you know.”  And she’s right.  Jack Kerouac may have said it best in On the Road: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

So here is the part where I tell you I’m going to continue to live, and burn like candles exploding.  And I’m going to keep searching for people who not only live like that, but also permit, support, encourage, me to live that, too, and to say it, feel it, remember it, create it, imagine it, reconcile it…and not for one minute, one second, be even a little bit sorry.  Unless I need to be, because I’ve been hurtful.  And then those kindred people I’ve found, they’ll help me fix it, and make it right to the universe, and then keep right on burning, with them at my side, while we hold each other’s pain, and transform that indestroyable energy into mutual radiance and grace, together and exponetially and unapologetically.