quizzical pussy

Growing up I had a game I liked to play. If I was stuck somewhere with a lot of other people and not much to do, I’d look at them one by one and figure out why each of them was beautiful.

Sometimes it wasn’t immediately apparent, especially if I knew and disliked someone. But if I looked long enough I’d find it. Sometimes it was shallow and obvious, and sometimes I had to work a little: a nose no one else would be born with for another 500 years, eyes hugged pleasantly by smile lines, a perfect cupid’s bow. I just had to find it beautiful, and as long as I found something in everyone I won the game.

I guess one could argue that the nature of this game was offensive and presumptuous on any number of levels, but what did I know? I was a kid and it never occurred to me that I was being rude by staring or shallow by focusing too much on people’s looks.

The interesting thing? I literally never lost. How could I? When you look for something like that it’s always there.

No one is born ugly. When you’re born you just look like whatever you look like; you aren’t yet equipped with all the tools required to make judgments about your face, your body type, your body fat percentage, whatever “flaws” you’re going to discover later.

And while there may be as many ways to be ugly as there are ways to be beautiful, everyone arrives at physical ugliness in the exact same way. You learn that there are good and bad ways of looking, you realize that you don’t necessarily look the way people want you to look; that they might think your appearance qualifies as bad. And then, the final and necessary step: You agree with them.

Because you’re not ugly if you don’t believe you are. There’s this amazing protective magic that happens when you don’t believe it, and that makes it impossible. If you feel like you look the way you’re supposed to look, every dirty look and snide comment dissolves in the power of you not giving a shit.

But if you buy into ugly, the naysayers you’re agreeing with don’t even have to be real. They can be completely imaginary, and all the real people in the world can think you’re exquisite, and that’s going to make not one lick of difference. You’re ugly, and no one is telling you any different.

The magic trick of not giving a shit is admittedly harder for some of us to master than others. Sometimes because the looks police bastards are very real, and intent to grind some of us down particularly. Sometimes because many of us refuse to realize the truth: we are never, not even ever, objectively ugly. Because there is no such thing.

When I think about how terribly hard I’ve worked to become ugly, it angers me. It could be so easy to find beauty in ourselves instead. Fuck, a six year old can do it.

(image source)