musings on life death beauty and ugliness and life as fiction
it has been an interesting day. many thoughts and emotions percolating, i think it comes with writing at least the way i write. tapping into feelings that you don't deal with every day...or that you do deal with every day just not consciously. i have been writing a story that deals with the idea of one's own beauty and what it can feel like when it is noticed for the first time. some people have no conscious memory of the first time someone told them they were beautiful it is a commonplace thing with no real value attached. others of us have an altogether different relationship with the word. it fascinates me really, the power of words now that i am writing this out. it may not be the fact of being told you are beautiful for the first time that gives the word such power it is more likely that moment when it is held up against all the times that the world or the people in it have told you that you aren't beautiful the proverbial drop in the bucket. it takes such strength to believe that one tiny moment in the face of all else. why is it so easy to believe the opposite? why do we internalize our own perceived ugliness and dismiss our beauty? i know i'm not alone in this i've seen it in the eyes of my friends and lovers.
i read a story today that brought back memories from years ago before therapy, before truly falling in love with someone, before coming out. memories of the aching heart of a girl who hadn't yet seen herself as beautiful even once and i was reminded of so many things, events, people, choices. the last couple of years i have discovered how much harm you can do to yourself by allowing the idea of ugliness of worthlessness to dwell in your heart. the idea of being ugly can slip in so easily and is so easily believed so much has to be put forth to outweigh it. i thought i was ugly, or at least not in any way beautiful i thought i had to take any scrap of love thrown my way because at any moment the person handing it out would realize how unworthy of it i was. it was inconievable to me that i could be beautiful even though i have been told i am by people i value dearly. it is only very recently i can hear the word and not immediately deny it and i know my story is not unique.
you see there are a couple of things that happened in my younger life that i've only talked about in therapy and with those i love most. the first being that i was raped by the first boy i ever had sex. with i don't say this for the shock value or to get some sort of comfort i say it because it makes it more real for me. i let it not be real for many years (like 15 of them) and it nearly destroyed me in tiny bits. instead of dealing in reality i let the rape and the subsequent year of my life this guy called himself my boyfriend become a fiction, i made up how it effected me, to some extent i even made up what happened covering the edges in a blanket until they became unrecongizable. the problem was all of the things that happened were still under the blanket and they still colored how i saw the world. my freshman year in college i was literaly seconds from killing myself but was stopped by a friend who to this day probably has no idea what she did and even that i covered and made up any number of completely plausable explainations as to why i had reached that point. in covering all of these things up i allowed them to attach to my spirit and i never even knew what was happening.
you may ask at this point what any of this has to do with beauty and ugliness. it may have nothing to do with the words themselves and more to do with how those words feel when they take root in your heart. our culture is designed to make us feel as though we are always somehow inadequate, not quite right that's why we continue to buy things to make ourselves better so we are trained to believe in our own shortcomings and never taught to embrace the perfection of our imperfection our uniqueness. we let ourselves believe that bad stuff because we aren't taught to believe the good stuff and so we take what we are left with.
anyway it is time for me to go to bed so i'm going to end this ramble but if you've read it and can take anything away from it i guess i would hope it would be to tell someone you know how beautiful they are and don't let them deny it, be stubborn hold out until at least a tiny part of them believes you could save them.
i read a story today that brought back memories from years ago before therapy, before truly falling in love with someone, before coming out. memories of the aching heart of a girl who hadn't yet seen herself as beautiful even once and i was reminded of so many things, events, people, choices. the last couple of years i have discovered how much harm you can do to yourself by allowing the idea of ugliness of worthlessness to dwell in your heart. the idea of being ugly can slip in so easily and is so easily believed so much has to be put forth to outweigh it. i thought i was ugly, or at least not in any way beautiful i thought i had to take any scrap of love thrown my way because at any moment the person handing it out would realize how unworthy of it i was. it was inconievable to me that i could be beautiful even though i have been told i am by people i value dearly. it is only very recently i can hear the word and not immediately deny it and i know my story is not unique.
you see there are a couple of things that happened in my younger life that i've only talked about in therapy and with those i love most. the first being that i was raped by the first boy i ever had sex. with i don't say this for the shock value or to get some sort of comfort i say it because it makes it more real for me. i let it not be real for many years (like 15 of them) and it nearly destroyed me in tiny bits. instead of dealing in reality i let the rape and the subsequent year of my life this guy called himself my boyfriend become a fiction, i made up how it effected me, to some extent i even made up what happened covering the edges in a blanket until they became unrecongizable. the problem was all of the things that happened were still under the blanket and they still colored how i saw the world. my freshman year in college i was literaly seconds from killing myself but was stopped by a friend who to this day probably has no idea what she did and even that i covered and made up any number of completely plausable explainations as to why i had reached that point. in covering all of these things up i allowed them to attach to my spirit and i never even knew what was happening.
you may ask at this point what any of this has to do with beauty and ugliness. it may have nothing to do with the words themselves and more to do with how those words feel when they take root in your heart. our culture is designed to make us feel as though we are always somehow inadequate, not quite right that's why we continue to buy things to make ourselves better so we are trained to believe in our own shortcomings and never taught to embrace the perfection of our imperfection our uniqueness. we let ourselves believe that bad stuff because we aren't taught to believe the good stuff and so we take what we are left with.
anyway it is time for me to go to bed so i'm going to end this ramble but if you've read it and can take anything away from it i guess i would hope it would be to tell someone you know how beautiful they are and don't let them deny it, be stubborn hold out until at least a tiny part of them believes you could save them.