Beautiful

I am cringing as I type this word: beautiful.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against beauty. But I’m going to write this post about a picture that a friend of mine took recently. And the picture was of me.

(Squirm.)

We’ll get to that picture in a minute. For now, we’ll start in profile, with that picture above.

*****
I’ve written before about one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott. (She is visiting Tacoma to speak next month. I squealed when I saw this announcement.) In her book about writing, Bird by Bird, she talks about the rewards of writing a present for someone that you love. And she’s absolutely right: I’ve written several short presents. I have loved writing them.

Writing presents put me in a kind of “flow” state (happy, focused, unaware of time passing). Doing this means that I am devoting myself to the task and loving it, and thinking hard about the recipient all the while. It’s the same state that I am in when I am crafting, just putting paper and glue or yarn and ribbon or other odd materials together. It’s one of the easiest ways to get me to create, and to be creative. (Side note: does this mean that I might write the memoir by making it a present? I’ve been rereading Isabel Allende’s memoir The Sum of Our Days, addressed to her daughter Paula who died young of porphyria.) It’s the act of giving and creating with someone very specific in mind.

So I wanted to write a present, to write a sort of longer thank-you note, to a friend who is going through a difficult time.

*****

Back to our original word, which I’ve avoided for a few paragraphs now: beautiful.

A few weeks ago, my friend and I were having lunch at a new restaurant in Seattle. We slurped up fresh (!) udon noodles and crunched our way through our selections from the tempura bar (!). Kabocha tempura is one of my very favorite Japanese foods. Hers, too. In line, we were both willing to wait for some more.

My friend’s a wonderful photographer and she was taking pictures throughout our lunch. We got to watch the workers make the dough for the udon, and run it through the pasta machine. And because my friend writes about food, she took pictures of our lunch. So it shouldn’t have surprised me when the camera came out again, toward the end of lunch.

“Could I take a few pictures of you?” she asked. “You just look so beautiful with your red sweater against that red wall.”

“Um, sure,” I must have stammered. Because then the camera with its impressive lens was clicking away at me, and while some folks know what to do when that happens, and revel in it, I have never really been one of them.

See, despite repeated reassurance from my parents and my husband, who are not to blame in this scenario, I have never really owned the word “beautiful” for myself. Cute, maybe. Pretty, maybe. Sometimes. But beautiful just takes it to a whole other level. And I’ve never been comfortable there. The picture up at the top of this post? Profile picture, most of me hidden. Much more comfortable.

Call it unresolved adolescent insecurity, perhaps. Call it a swallowing of so many magazines and movies and TV shows about a few selective types of beauty. Call it a not-fitting into any traditional, petite-Asian woman definition. Or call it not-fitting into athletic definitions, either. I’ve been practicing yoga for almost 4 years, but I don’t buy ventolin inhaler australia have a typical lithe and supple yoga body. I’ve been running for over a year regularly, but I don’t have a typical lean runner’s body, either. (I do have a medical condition that causes me to build up more muscle when I exercise, and thus makes it harder to lose weight.) Perhaps more accurately, call it a lingering unhappiness with myself, which—happily—seems to recede the older I get.

When I see pictures of myself, I tend to focus on some sort of flaw: my flat and wide nose. A double chin which, I am happy to say, seems to be in recession at the moment. Or my eyes, which narrow far too often in judgmental self-awareness and analytic self-consciousness. Or my round moon face. I am rarely happy with photos of myself, which is sort of sad, but it’s the truth. The best pictures of me when I was young are not usually ones when I am looking at the camera.

But there was my friend across the table, happily taking multiple shots of my face!—mostly just my face! I chattered nervously while she took more pictures. She had me look off to one side for a little bit, maybe to get a different angle, maybe to help me feel better again. More soft clicking from the camera. Then I looked back. Smiled some more. Sometimes I opened my mouth a bit to smile, sometimes I closed my mouth.

She sent me a few of the shots later on, and I loved them. I have needed a new “head shot” for a while, and I knew that I wanted something different on my Twitter feed, on my Facebook page, on LinkedIn, and here in this space. I especially wanted one for this blog, for readers who haven’t met me yet. So I added one as my profile picture on Facebook. Positive comments and “likes” came in—“radiant,” “stunning,” and there was that word again and again, “beautiful.”

I took all those words to my shy, bookish, adolescent, nerdy fat-girl heart. I cherished them like pop-song lyrics, repeating them to myself over and over again.

*****

In Tayari Jones’s compelling novel, Silver Sparrow, one of her two adolescent-girl narrators talk about what it is to be “a silver girl”: the beautiful girl who seems beloved of fate and fortune, who seemingly never has to worry about her looks or her life. Of course, we also read the novel partly from the “silver girl”’s point of view, too, and we know that she has just as many things to worry about. But despite so much evidence to the contrary, some insistent part of me has never quite stopped believing that physical beauty makes one’s life so much easier and happier. And, as a corollary, that same part of me has insisted that I would never be physically beautiful, and never have been.

My mother? Stunning. My daughters? Radiant. Everyone has said so. People might love me for my nice-girl personality, or for my enthusiasm to make them read something new, or for my baked goods, or for my fancy-menu writing that makes them drool. Me? Beautiful? No way.

But whose definition of beauty have I swallowed all these years? And what stops me now from reshaping that definition? Why should I care so much about physical beauty?

And yet I love the picture that my friend took of me. Because to see your own beauty as your dear friends see you—that is, to see yourself as your friends and loved ones see you—is no small gift.  It makes life so much more than easier and happier.

Maybe my reshaping of beauty starts here, with more words from Anne Lamott: “Joy is the best makeup. That, and good lighting.”

Thank you, dear friend.