Amazing and Beautiful, Loved and Chosen

Apropos of the million reassurances the world seems eager to give me that I, too, am beautiful (so buy This Thing!), I recognized at some point in the forty eight hours, probably while running, that I feel very tense around the whole world beautiful. That beautiful, actually, may not be something I want to be at all.

Is that okay?

It is, so it must be.

I'm okay with it, anyway. I've decided it's more interesting and cool to be a perceiver of beauty, to walk in it and seek it out and see it, than to be it, myself.

Again, if you, like me, have spent years or a lifetime fighting yourself over this -- believing you should be beautiful, but that you aren't, or that you need to be beautiful, when Beauty always fit more like someone else's shoes --

You don't have to be beautiful. You can just not be beautiful, and do other things, and it's exactly the amount of loss you count it as. 

I don't think I'm beautiful, but I do love myself. I do think I'm worth your time, whoever "you" are.

And here's some things that legit are beautiful:

• The smile on Elsa's* face when I rub her head and sing to her. Elsa is some variant of profoundly retarded; she doesn't move, speak, or focus her eyes. I can't tell if anything else I do -- talk or read or sing -- matters to her. But her face when I rub her head is exactly what yours or mine or my son's would be, only better. 

• And also Jasmin's*, when she and I are talking math a few doors down from Elsa, or when she's telling me that the social worker is getting her back into actual high school rather than the wildly inappropriate "high school" on the unit, in which no other child is over eight years old or can understand language. 

• My amazing and ordinary and perfect son, making a bridge out of my arm as we wait for his vaccination and then kissing that bridge, right to the left of my wrist; brave in the face of his last IM injection until age four; zooming all the cars all over the doctor's office/bookstore/apartment like he personally invented joy. 

And running in the mornings, and walking in the mornings, and the park in the mornings, and walking home with my family at night; and kids coming home from school in primary-colored uniforms, and the painstaking butterfly my sponsored child from India added to his mandatory thank-you letter, and, I've heard, U2's new album, the New Yorker's requisite snobbery aside. (You lose me entirely when you complain that someone "wants the world to be a better place" too much.) 

It occurs to me that my problem was to look for beauty in my own face and body rather than in everything around me all the time, where it is literally dripping onto the ground at all times. 

It occurs to me that this sort of misdirection is how one might miss huge chunks of my life. And that the lesson that I Don't Have to Care if I'm Beautiful is actually one of the biggest gifts the universe has handed me, like, ever. 

If your own beauty or lack thereof has been on your mind, or bringing you down -- for, you, my friend, a hearty mug of Don't Give a Flying Fuck. To me, you probably are beautiful, anyway; who knows, if I had world enough and time, but that you'd be on my list. 

But you actually don't have to be. I'm pointedly not bringing sexy back, replacing it instead with "loved" and "chosen" and "valuable". All of which you are, and so am I. 

* OBVIOUSLY THESE ARE NOT THEIR NAMES.