I was at breakfast this morning (okay, afternoon, because I was up until past 5 a.m. watching "Huge", which I'll talk about later; don't judge me). Now, I love breakfast with a ridiculous, fiery passion, enough that I will eat alone, in public, on a regular basis in order to indulge. Also, this place in town makes the best breakfast burritos. Just so you know.
The point is, I was out at breakfast with my delicious burrito, reading the Shapely Prose archive on my phone and enjoying the Very Cute Waiter whenever he came by. A lovely time, all in all. After a while, though, when I was about to get up to refill my coffee I glanced over at the VCW again to see him chatting with a very pretty girl sitting a few tables over. Immediately, despite having left the house feeling quite satisfied with how I looked, my self-confidence took a nosedive. The thought process is a familiar one, and goes something like this:
She is thin and pretty --> I do not look like her --> therefore I am not pretty.
It's a problem I frequently encounter when I'm out, just one of the self-esteem pit traps to be navigated. I could feel my shoulders hunching in, my head lowering, the thought going 'round and 'round my head, Keep quiet, keep your head down, don't let anyone notice you. Just getting up from the table, crossing the room to get another cup of coffee felt like a horrifying, daunting prospect. But instead of letting those feelings inform my actions, I squared my shoulders and stood up and crossed the damn room. Because really, the thought process should go something more like this:
She is thin and pretty --> I do not look like her --> so the fuck what?
Here's the thing to understand, and what has taken me far too long to be able to articulate: there is not a finite amount of attractiveness out there.
There is plenty of pretty to go around. If there is a pretty girl in the room, that does not make me less so. One person being pretty does not take away from the rest of us. Insane as it may sound, I only realized today that if I'm pretty, and another pretty girl walks in (even if she's prettier than I am), my level of attractiveness have not changed. Pretty has not suddenly been subtracted from me, or from anyone else to accommodate her presence.
If I don't look like her, what does that matter? If I saw a girl who looked exactly like me, except she had blonde hair, would I think that I couldn't possibly be as pretty because my hair was dark?* So why the hell am I letting myself get hung up on the fact that I don't look like someone else as though it makes me any less pretty?
Because it doesn't.
There are so many different kinds of pretty out there. (And I will compile some of them here, because I like to look at pictures of people I think are pretty.) Sure, maybe not everyone is going to find me attractive. But that's true of anyone; there is absolutely no such thing as an absolutely universal standard of beauty. How much happier would I be if I stopped defining my self-image based on other people?
I think quite a bit.
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