“Beauty is pain.”

I don’t where it came from. I can’t recall the first time I ever heard the saying, but I think that it was something I felt long before these particular words categorized the seemingly instinctual hatred I carried for myself. Of course I would suffer to be beautiful. I had to, of course. And, oh yes, the beauty was painful.

You are not supposed to like yourself. Our world thrives off of our self-doubts, our perfectionism, the deep guttural nausea that bubbles upon sight of a mirror. The unkempt nails, the bumpy skin, the hair that never shines the way it ought to, the curves of our bodies that we could only wish to file down with sandpaper, and the certainty that every bad thing that has ever happened to us was birthed from this awful, ugly outer layer we are forced to be confined by. (“Would this have happened if I was prettier? Of course not.”)

You are not supposed to like yourself, because if you do, it ruins the possibility of profit. It destroys the power of the industry, because if you think that you are complete and sufficient within yourself, they have nothing to sell you. They have nothing to hold against you. Thus inspires these commercials and advertisements and magazines and medias all dedicated to convince you that there is something inherently wrong with what you are; you are too dangerous to let slip away without the realization of your defects.

I was manipulated and I was deluded, and I will tell you what I thought beauty was. I thought beauty was cruelty. In my view of the world, beauty was the hollow left in my stomach when I ate only enough to get by, but never enough to feel good. Beauty was the sensation of my body shrinking and condensing under the heavy pressures that were always surrounding. It was physically seeing myself getting smaller and smaller as the days went by, and the headaches and irritability always expanding. It was something to hurt myself for, something that required maltreatment and hatred.

I am lying sick in bed as I write this, and I can remember the time where I would be thrilled with this prospect. Flus and bugs were a special treat because they made me even smaller. I would fantasize about how much leaner I would be by the time the germs stopped ravaging my body as I withered away under stomach pains. How could I have been so ecstatic to lay bedridden with fevers and chills and aches? Because beauty was pain and emptiness.

But beauty is never these things. Beauty is happiness. I am far from the point of accepting myself fully, but I at least know now that beauty comes from joy, laughter, and love. Beauty is smiling. Beauty is taking a deep breath. It is driving down the open road on a sunny day with my friends, it is hearing my parents’ voices over the phone when I call from school, it is taking my dog for long walks in the sunshine, and it is dedicating myself to unlearning the years of self hatred, one small victory at a time.