sometimes i look pretty, sometimes i don't. i'm okay with that now.

we are all just people.

sometimes i serve. sometimes i… don’t. well, i’m always serving something. but sometimes i’m serving divalicious elegant fairy princess and sometimes i’m serving pig pen from peanuts. you never know what the soup du jour is going to be with me!

besides, i heard that the essence of eroticism is leaving an air of mystery about yourself… a little to be left to the imagination… an imagination in which i am either in a gorgeous red gown and heels or have hay in my hair from laying down in the pasture with the pigs wearing my ralph wiggum from the simpsons picking his nose shirt.

sometimes i look pretty, sometimes i don’t.

i used to be so ashamed of that.

why couldn’t i look beautiful all the time? why did i feel like i couldn’t leave the house without doctoring my face at least a little bit? why was i so scared of someone comparing a photo i’ve posted online to a screenshot from one of my youtube videos and all the comments saying what a “catfish” i am the way they do to celebrities?

maybe it’s the internal male gaze. maybe it’s just plain old insecurity. maybe it’s the summer camp boyfriend who said my face looks hilarious without makeup in high school. for whatever reason, my appearance was at the forefront of my mind for much of my teen years.

now, i don’t really care at all. i have moments, yes, and sometimes i replay my own videos with no sound and just stare at my perceived imperfections over and over again, sure. i’m not proud of it, and those are dark nights. but by and large, i’ve realized and embodied the fact that being pretty is not my job. i don’t owe anyone that. i owe people kindness, honesty, trust, yada yada yada bada bing bada boom.

but i don’t owe them pretty.

can someone find that one quote?

ah, here it is.

“You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.” - Erin McKean

being pretty is no longer on the list of my obligations. i’ve accepted that we all have angles we like and angles we don’t. we all have moments where our faces look different in motion than they do in a selfie. we all have bodies that fluctuate and moments where we think we look stunning and moments where we think we look horrid. i’m no different.

you can acknowledge that you don’t like something about your body and not do anything to change it.

that was so freeing for me. i feel like saying it again. i don’t want to be seeming like those millennial-coded tweets/notes that end with “Read that again.” but literally read it again! this is my blog! i hold you captive, not the other way around!

you can acknowledge that you don’t like something about your body and not do anything to change it.

wait, my jawline isn’t a problem that needs solving? wait, my body just looks like this and the world will keep spinning even if i don’t lose weight? wait, i like how i look better with makeup and i can just have that thought and move on? wait, this passing feeling doesn’t have to ruin my whole day?

yes! and isn’t that wonderful?

a huge part of me recovering from my debilitating self-image issues was decentering men when i thought about myself. i understand that to decenter men is still to base your existence in relation to men but, my god, we don’t have to analyze every single thing we feel and wonder if it’s problematic or not. we’re all just trying to survive in a fucked up dystopian world! and teaching myself not to value men’s opinions on my appearance helped me to survive. and it might help you. it’s okay if it does.

in my essay “I was a lesbian for two years. This is what it taught me.” i went a little deeper on this, but i’ll drop a quote here if you don’t feel like going to read that (and you so totally do not have to).

“as a teenager and young adult i placed so, so much of my worth in whether or not men saw me as attractive and worthy, that i should be desirable above else and that if a man didn’t treat me the way i wished he would, it was inherently because of a personal deficiency on my end. i have put years into unlearning that, and today i am proud to say that i place most of my value in the type of person i am, not what i look like. i owe a lot of that to my years spent completely disregarding what men thought of me.

for my two years as a lesbian, i still cared about being attractive to some extent of course, but i felt like the women i dated saw me so much more as a person than a body, which helped me view myself that way. this is not to the say that there aren’t fuckboy lesbians and bi girls out there because there are, but the love between two women in my experience tended to go so much deeper than appearances in a way my early dating experiences with men did not, except on my end.

i felt comfortable to be myself and to explore that self entirely separate from the male gaze, to experiment with androgyny and masculinity and feel safe to do so because i knew it wouldn’t threaten my desirability, which i’d come to value less and less.

i got a lesbian haircut. i’d never taken a big risk like that before and while it wasn’t that cute in hindsight, it made me feel like me at the time and there was something so empowering about knowing i made that decision based on what i wanted to look like and explore, not whether or not it i looked pretty with it. i will always be so thankful for that period and the risks i took in expressing myself physically, emotionally, and sexually because they taught me that i am so much more than how i exist in relation to men.”

you don’t have to fit the male gaze if you don’t want to. you don’t have to be desirable to men. you don’t owe any part of your appearance to someone else, ever.

another aspect that was freeing for me was realizing that when you love someone, you think they look beautiful all the time. when you see your best friend, do you care if they’re wearing makeup or not? do you think she should lose weight? do you mind if they haven’t washed their hair in four days? no. probably not.

and we’ve all had someone mention an insecurity of theirs around us and been like, wait what? i would have never even noticed that.

you see this person as a wonderful, beautiful human being because you see them for who they are, not what they look like. you recognize that every moment in time is just one snapshot of how someone looks at a given time. try to have that same grace with yourself.

we are all just people. people with rolls, wrinkles, stretch marks, acne, bellies, cellulite, the list goes on and on.

additionally, if your only frame of reference for what a person “should” look like was your real, offline experience in the world, if you had never seen an influencer who tried to sell you flat tummy tea or the fact that almost every body in hollywood looks the same (and not like you), would you think there was anything wrong with your body at all?

if the only range of bodies you saw was the people you see when you go to the grocery store you probably wouldn’t think you should be smaller, taller, thinner, curvier, younger, etc.

you might think, “some of these people are bigger than me, some are smaller than me. some wear makeup, some look like they just woke up and had to grab an ingredient for breakfast. some have gray hair, some dye theirs.” and you wouldn’t think that you as yourself are out of place at all.

i’ll say it again: we are all just people.

and how you look naturally is how your body wants to exist in the world. that is lovely and beautiful and wonderful and how could there be anything wrong with you or how you look just for being who you are?

there isn’t.

besides, looks are fleeting! even the people who won the genetic lottery are not immune to wrinkles, aging, weight gain, stretch marks, etc. and anyone who seems to not have any of these things has probably taken great effort to make it seem like they don’t. but they do.

because, for the third and last time, we are all just people.