My Idea of Beauty

 My Idea Of Beauty

More often than expected we are all told to be a certain way. We need to look a certain way and behave a certain way to fit into these predecided standards of our society, in so many aspects of life and in ways that sometimes feel outrageous.I wonder where these notions have originated from and when we all became so used to these beliefs. Just a few days back I got really upset because somebody I know said something not so good about how I look and now looking back at that incident I do not know why I reacted the way I did. Maybe in my mind, I think of myself as this strong woman who is not affected by such trivial issues which perhaps I am not. And then I also muse on the fact that this is all a consequence of how we all grew up always giving importance to external beauty much more than we give to other things which do hold a lot more importance. And it's become kind of a cool thing to say that "looks don't matter to me" but do we really mean it when we say that. Today my English teacher while teaching this lesson called "A thing of beauty" asked me," Mahi, What does beauty mean to you? What according to you is beautiful?" interestingly I did not know what to say. Still, the words just kept coming out of my mouth from literally nowhere like I had known she was going to ask me this and I had come prepared. Beauty is just so much more than physical appearance to me it's about how that person or thing makes me feel. I find beauty in sunsets or when I am looking at the night sky in June and I can see all the stars twinkling against that black backdrop because these little things make me feel a certain way. I find beauty when I look into my mother's eyes in the morning just after I wake up because of the love I see in them and that feeling that I get which truly is the reason I get up and start my day in the hope that one day I will be able to give back just enough for them to be proud of me. None of us is perfect and we all have our fair share of insecurities that we try to hide from society, we are all just flawed but still we choose to pretend we are not. We idealize ideas that have never even existed, that of a perfect body, or glass clear skin, or silky hair but come on don't we all lack one or more of these things because the reality is that we can not have it all and it was always meant to be that way. I have been thinking a lot about this and I noticed all these small things that we say quite normally during conversations and don't even realize that what we say could have a long-lasting impact on the other person. With social media this has just gotten worse without even consciously thinking about it we judge people we don't even know based on just a few pictures or a random reel and often we compare ourselves to people we think look perfect and start hating our own bodies for no valid reason at all.

It is high time that we all start actively unlearning these worthless beliefs and turn to attributes that actually define someone's personality.

This is a piece by Scott Fitzgerald which I love-

"She was BEAUTIFUL, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful deep down to her soul"

We are all beautiful more than we think we are for everything that we do not because of just how we look.