On Love #It'sOn

As I ate my dinner, sitting alone in my one bedroom apartment, I found myself contemplating beauty. For the past days, this topic came up a lot in my head given all the time I spend on my own, reading, eating, sleeping and learning about Bitcoin. What is beauty? Does it emanate from within or cultivated from the outside? Is it about aesthetics and sexual desire? Or is it about health, truth and goodness? Can it be both? Or is that a false equivalence? Growing up as the eldest of four girls (one sister, Neda, second in line, died otherwise we might have been five), the question of whether I am beautiful mattered. What does this have to do with love, you might be thinking. Somewhere within yourself, you already know the answer to the question. We all do. Am I worthy of love? That, Shakespeare, is the question. My formative years were spent mainly in North Africa and the Middle East. To be specific, I left the USA at the age of 4, and moved to Sudan, then Juba, which is now the capital of South Sudan. Next, we moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and then Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Let me be clear, and this will offend people, especially Americans. In those countries and regions, Black is NOT beautiful period. The closer your skin color is to black, the "uglier" you are thought to be. Unfortunately for me, I was the darkest skinned one in my family. My family and relatives would qualify my beauty. A practice that is done to this day. They would say things like, her features are fine, or her eyes are beautiful, but it's too bad about her color.  Interestingly, I would later pick up a South Korean friend, living in the diaspora, who would tell me that Koreans would say the same thing about my beauty. It's all about the eyes for me, when it comes to physical beauty. I swallowed my fate as the not beautiful one and left that distinction to my sisters. Apparently the one who died was the most beautiful, all lost within 6 months of life. How we glorify the dead. Later on in life, I ran across a play by an American writer, Thornton Wilder, called "Our Town." It was a class assignment and I would've ordinarily missed it but thank God I found it. Or rather it found me. In that play, Emily, one of the daughters in the family, asks her mother if she is beautiful. Her mother takes a while to answer. She is a thoughtful woman, not dismissive, but not reflexively dishonest as some other parents might be. She tells her daughter a line I have clung to for dear life ever since. Ready? Her mother tells her, she is "good enough for normal purposes." What a relief for a thinking child like me who intellectualized everything as a means of survival. I told myself, I might not be beautiful and desirable to boys, men but I am "functional" like a machine. I work. I eat, I sleep, I think, I dream, I talk, I write, and eventually, I have sex and I produce children. My quality control test is passed. Such is the defeatist attitude I lived by that no wondered I believed I am unworthy of love. My Dad wrote me a letter whereby he described me as a chip (a computer chip, that is), a pulley, or a mechanical contraption of sorts. Now, let me ask you a question. How many of you want to love or be loved by a metal implement? Zero, right? My own mother didn't help. She told me once with a straight face, as if passing on generational wisdom, how I should grab the first guy who proposes because I am unlikely to get many suitors on account of my looks. True story. She went on to describe how she got lots of suitors herself, but times have changed, she said. What she didn't say out loud, but was abundantly clear to me, is I fell short of her beauty standards. In America, I was considered pretty. At least I think so. I found myself more than once wondering if I was wrong about my "not beautiful" identity. But I quickly dismissed it. Like a well-entrenched mind spell, it would have been too hard to break it. If I can't be beautiful, I can cozy up to them. Maybe it will rub off on me. I studied beauty like a discipline worthy of God himself/herself. What are the attributes, the methods, the golden ratios. There was so much to learn and so many artists to admire, from all walks of life. I set about curating a sense of beauty inspired by the greats, Da Vinci, Botticelli and Degas. I fell in love with the esoteric, the vague, the ethereal beings. There's beauty in the unknown, I deduced. There is attraction to the mysterious. I have that in spades. I will play up these assets, like wanton women play up their generous cleavage. If you say tit, I say tat. If you say no, I say maybe. Not always a contrarian, but with enough enigma to induce interest from wanna-be cypher breakers. I was going to be the best thinking man's kind of beauty. If I am ugly, why succumb? Why not jujitsu it into another kind of veneer, also organized, shiny and glossy. Have you noticed how celebrities all of a sudden get more pleasing to the eye? This kind of thing needs resources, not just money but time and effort. It is a form of Proof-of-Work. Beauty does not happen overnight. Rather, it depends on how much you want it, and what vision you have for yourself. Similar to an artist facing a blank canvas, or a writer searching for the right words, a beauty cultivator faces an existential dilemma, of the most severe kind. What kind of being are you? How do you present to the world? What do you see? How do you want to be seen? You may have thought this post is about inner beauty and being a kind, well-liked person. To be fair, that is not my interest. I am looking for consumable beauty, the find that is power, the kind that moves the world. It is about ego, but it is not egotistical. It's self love, it is inner strength, it is armor to shield against a world gone mad. Ultimately, it is love. A gateway drug to the deep love that binds and holds for a lifetime. I have so much love inside me to give. Surely then, I am beautiful. Tell me you see it. Because my kind of beauty blossoms in your love, my love.