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I arrived in the United States at the age of 11, and my family moved to an extremely homogeneous neighborhood on the outskirts of Houston, Texas. Not only was the culture quite foreign to me, at the junior high school where I was enrolled I looked and sounded different from everyone around me. I managed the best way I could, and in general, I did okay. But the truth is that eleven is such an incredibly awkward age: It's the age when hormones begin to rage, our faces and hair become oily and greasy, and our bodies begin to plump out in shocking ways (or, as in my case, become unforgivingly angular). And cruelly, this is also the time when we start to really become aware of what our society deems "beautiful" -- we watch with wonder on television, in magazines, in movies and on stage the teenagers and adults who are anointed Beautiful, who become the standards for which we are encouraged to aim. These are the Beautiful Ones, we are overtly or covertly told. You should be just like them. Don't, and you fail.
It is a wonder, then, that any of us grow up to have any self-esteem at all.
The problem of course, is that at age 11, few of us, if any, have much experience with being loved by anyone other than the people who are connected to us by family, or otherwise feel an obligation to take care of us. Eventually, of course, we fall in love, and we meet people who love us, but then we also fall out of love -- and when we do (or if romantic love comes later to us in life), we can't help but wonder: Is the ability to sustain love -- the kind of love we see in movies or on television -- directly related to how beautiful we are?
And this, my friends, is a heavy question to deal with when you're eleven, or twelve, or even older. At least, this definitely was the case with me. Honestly, I was well into adulthood before I was comfortable with the truth that I would never, ever achieve the standard I had somehow decided, based on the media, as being technically "beautiful."
But then one day -- surprisingly recently, in fact, within the last five years or so -- I had a moment of enlightenment: I realized that this standard of beauty, the one that had been fed to me all my life, was complete bogus. My epiphany went something like this:
1. First of all, I was never, ever, ever going to stop feeling different from everyone else. This is actually a good thing. It dawned on me that we are individuals for a reason.
2. It is therefore also extremely likely that everyone else -- including those anointed as one of the Beautiful Ones -- also will never, ever, ever stop feeling different from everyone else as well.
3. I realized that some of the most beautiful people I have ever known -- people who were able to stir my soul just by walking into the room -- were people who others might not have found, on first glance, particularly attractive. Similarly, there are many people I've encountered in my life who others have been unable to stop themselves from gushing about their beauty, while I, frankly, just didn't see it. There must be something to this individual perception of beauty.
4. Given the above, it finally became very clear to me -- like a bolt of lightning, actually -- that the majority of us go through life confusing what is deemed Commercially Desirable for the Purpose of Selling and Marketing a Product (including, of course, those products shown to us by television, movies and music) with True Beauty. And the difference between the two is this:
While something or someone who has been declared commercially, aesthetically desirable might have the power to incite lust or longing, only true beauty has the power to stir someone's soul.
Given this fact -- given the fact that at some point we will all experience love (romantic or otherwise) and that we have experienced our own souls being moved by the mere presence of another person (a romantic interest or otherwise), it therefore cannot be too big a leap of logic to realize that, regardless of some arbitrary societal standard of whether we possess a commercial-aesthetic-capable-of-marketing-or-selling-a-product, we all, every single one of us, without exception, have
