Uncommon Beauty

The photographer who took my pictures is featuring me in her student show this week for her Art and Spirituality course. The theme of her show is Uncommon Beauty. She asked me to share some thoughts with her class, and this is what I came up with:

We all search for beauty, constantly. And most of us know that beauty exists in uncommon places, places that are not advertised or exploited. No, finding beauty in uncommon places is not our problem. Our problem is that we often can't see the beauty in the one place that is more common to us than anywhere else--within ourselves. We fail to see the beauty in our faces, bodies, hearts and minds. I think this is precisely because we are constantly searching for beauty. But, being the physical beings that we are, we can't help but conjure up some "other" ideal in our minds that we seek to match. We form these mental standards based on our own experiences/cultural norms/imprinting, so they look different perhaps for different groups of people, but we all have something that, to us, represents "true beauty". And for whatever reason, that ideal is never a reflection of ourselves. We look outside of ourselves for beauty. It feels natural to be propelled outward.

We fail to turn inward and look at ourselves as the standard of true beauty. But we are the standard. God made us in His image as the crowning glory of His creation. And since we all look so different, He must not have been talking about looks. When will we get that?

Paradoxically, I have always had an image in my mind of what I look like. It's idealized--the magazine cover version of myself. Looking at my photos was hard for me, because they didn't match the image in my head. The image in my head had no "flaws". In my photos, I'm just me. I have had to step back and look at them the way others are looking at them (based on what they tell me). Instead of looking at individual features that don't look perfect because they're not airbrushed, I had to face my flaws and realize that, when taken as a whole, they actually add up to a beautiful person. As they do for all of us.

So, uncommon beauty turns out to be the beauty we have failed to recognize in our common, everyday selves. Maybe if we could really get this we could stop striving to find perfect beauty elsewhere, thus causing people who don't fit our standard to be pushed out to the margins and made to feel inferior.

I'm grateful for this experience. I'm so glad I have these pictures of myself in a place I love. I'm still on the journey of defining myself as beautiful, but this was a big step--if only to show me that a lot of people see me as beautiful and to force myself to normalize my actual appearance, not the idealized version.

Does that make any sense, or am I just contradicting myself? Let me know.