the beholder

I am my most beautiful alone.

Which is to say, I’m most beautiful through my own eyes.

I’m also my ugliest through those eyes, those that have been trained to look for it (the ugliness), to find it (the contrast), to hate it (me).

I have all the stories you know. The “such a pretty face” aunties, the SlimFast mother, the schoolboys who called me gorgeous because that was the joke, the friends who shrugged into my jackets and held out their arms in shock, dangling the gaping sleeves like scarecrows shivering in the breeze. 

I have following men away from the crowds because they told me I was beautiful, tossing myself like a palm-warmed coin into murky water with a wish for an overnight metamorphosis. I have waking up more Gregor Samsa than swallowtail, scuttling home with my body pressed close to the walls, avoiding the glare of daylight. I have waking up disappointed to be waking up, changing names of contacts to DON’T PICK UP and staring through my reflection as the train climbed out of the dark.

(There are probably some you don’t know, but this is one of those things it kind of sucks to be original about. They’re in a file labeled with the memory of my friends’ faces melting in helpless horror, all their pretty eyes trembling, threatening to dissolve.)

What feels radical is not to call myself beautiful, not accepting the gift of someone else’s declaration with grace (just enough) and without objection (just shut up). What feels honest is not embracing every angle, every photo, every bloated, every sallow raccoon-eyed mid-chew slump-shouldered candid. 

I have always been able to find myself beautiful. I didn’t learn the gaze studying the masters of selfies and smizes. Representation didn’t reveal what was behind my glasses and overalls the whole time. (honest)

I am not always beautiful, which is to say I am capable of ugliness, which is to say I am alive. (radical)

I am my ugliest when I look through others. I know how to look at myself. When I’m ugly, I mean, that’s a you problem. (fact)

I used to think it was dysmorphia, which I learned about when my mother signed me up for small-group nutrition counseling as a chubby 12-year-old. In between teaching us dieting “tips and tricks” and reviewing our food logs with a critical eye, the counselor read to us from a textbook about eating disorders. We learned that people suffering from anorexia and bulimia often experience a different reality, seeing themselves as fat when they look in the mirror or at their bodies. “It can happen the other way too,” the counselor assured us. “Do you ever look in the mirror and think you look slim or that you look good?”

My friend from the group messaged me on AIM to ask if I ever did that, the dysmorphia thing. She never did, she said. She knew what she looked like, that’s why she was in the group. I stood in front of my mirrored closet, gazing at my face, my body, the shadows and light draped over me. 

No, I lied. I never thought I was beautiful.

That wasn’t the first divide, but an early one. I collected gazes like filmstrips for my Viewfinder, pressed my eyes to the lenses and tipped my face up to the light. Click once for me as my mother saw me — a jumbo version of her whose existence mocked her obsessive efforts to stay lean and youthful. Click again for me through the eyes of my classmates. 

Click: shifty, not to be trusted alone in the shop. 

Click: peach-ripe, plump in all the right places, asking for it. 

Click: desperately in need of an unsolicited reminder to smile. 

Click: weird try-hard with frizzy hair and stubby arms. 

I’ve had to be different people in the same skin since before I can remember, so it’s not a stretch for me to accept that all of these versions exist. 

Which is to say that I am both ugly and beautiful (of course). 

I don’t mean that I am beautiful in the way that everyone is beautiful, or that I am always beautiful. I’m not beautiful the way I am curious or brown or strange. I’m beautiful like I’m petty or hungry or quiet. 

I’m beautiful like I’m ugly: sometimes. 

And I’m glad of it. It’s so much pressure, thinking you have to be beautiful all the time, that beauty is a pre-requisite for living. Imagine if you had to be hungry every minute of the day, if you could never take a break from spite. It’s a relief to know that beauty is not a fixed state. It’s welcome, the permission to be ugly, to be plain, to be. 

As I get older, I am confronted by my body and its demands. I never took care of myself well, always flinging myself through life with only mild curiosity about how I’d end up. My body had to get loud enough that I couldn’t ignore it, and I had to get well enough to care that it was in need. 

I’m beginning to learn myself, my patterns. I know more about what I need to function comfortably. I recognize the conditions that influence my mood, my physical discomfort, my creativity. 

My beauty comes with its own conditions concerning lighting, hydration level, and what to do with my arms. There are more, like how much pain I’ve been feeling and how many people I’m around. 

I’m beautiful when I’m alone. Even handing the camera to someone who loves me, I know the photos will feature me twisting in shame or scowling in an attempt to appear casual, splotched across the frame like a stain. 

Put me back in a city and I’ll go grey and hunchbacked, grimace like a Halloween mask, arms dangling like sausage links in a butcher shop window. 

Alone, I bend the light around myself until I am wrapped in it, glowing. I shift; I shimmer; I click photos for my eyes only.