2003-01-03

There are those women who take for granted their own attractiveness. They can stride down a street, confident that others have seen them and noted their loveliness. I look at them, and I just know certain things. I know that these women were beautiful babies, who grew to be beautiful children, who grew into beautiful adolescents, who entered adulthood with the same beauty that they�d had all their lives. These women, they have a different walk. They move with an assurance that you don�t find in just anybody.

I can tell the lifelong beauties from those whose attractiveness is, shall we say, more recent in nature. Perhaps they�re late bloomers, or maybe they�ve been cosmetically enhanced, but these women, for whatever reason, find themselves being treated the way that the world treats beauty: with awe, and not a little fawning. They accept this treatment, but they�re never really quite comfortable with it; their actions show them to be more aware of their looks than those who have always been lovely. Maybe they don�t know what to make of the attention, or maybe they�re just afraid that one day they will wake up, and find that they have reverted to their former state.

The first group of women, the lifelong beauties, has always fascinated me. I used to be consumed with thoughts of these women: what was it that made them beautiful? how did it feel to be beautiful? and most importantly: why couldn�t I also be beautiful? The second group, though, I never paid them much attention until I joined their ranks.

I guess I started out as a cute enough kid. Nothing spectacular, but cute in the same general way of most kids. Looking back at photographs, I can see that while I wasn�t ever going to win any Baby Beautiful contests, my face wasn�t going to frighten small animals either. My parents will tell anybody who will listen that I was never ugly, but I have to disagree. Some time around age 7 or 8, it became very obvious that my teeth were not going to behave and stay in my mouth. This was combined with a thin, homely face, and stick-like, awkward limbs. Without realizing it, I had become ugly.

Because my appearance had never before mattered to me, it took the stares and words of others to inform me of my own unattractiveness. I was compared to horses, mules, monkey, dogs, and pretty much every other animal to which one would never want to be likened. My teeth were so badly bucked as to require braces, which only increased the taunting. While I was never the most unpopular kid, nobody could look at me and mistake me for a member of the �in� crowd.

After braces came glasses, which I�d put off having for several years. I would only submit to one deformity at a time. I�d changed my hair to an infinitely more flattering style, but this change was accompanied by a significant weight gain. I used to imagine that there might have been even one week where I was absolutely stunning, after the braces but before the weight gain. Maybe I walked around just the same as always, completely unaware of how attractive I looked. This thought helped to see me through some of the more painful appearance-related episodes of my teenage years. Such as the time in 8th grade when T.L., a particularly wretched girl, called me fat in front of my entire dance class. I was stunned. When I looked in the mirror, I didn�t see a fat girl. She actually had to say it twice, since I didn�t realize at first that she was talking to me. I wondered, �Am I really fat? Why hadn�t anyone told me when I became fat? Why didn�t I realize?� Looking back at photos from that time, I can concede a certain adolescent chubbiness, but no more. I was not fat, not in the general sense, although I was, physically, as large then as I have ever been in my life.

By high school, I�d accepted certain realities about my looks. I could do decent, and sometimes even cute (a male teacher once slipped and told me so), but okay was probably all that I could reasonably expect. I figured that okay beat ugly any day, and was prepared to be that for the rest of my life. But then something unexpected happened: people began to find me attractive. I had a nice shape, an honest face, and it must have just clicked. It was easier for people who didn�t know me, or those who didn�t see me frequently, to see how I really looked. Those people who I saw on a regular basis, with the exception of my parents, who always thought I was pretty, could not help but see me through the lens of the past. Current Day Me had to be filtered through the bucked teeth of the Little League era and the chubbiness of 8th grade before she could be seen. But I was beginning to find that I was not unappealing. In several years, I�d gone from being an open child, to a reserved preadolescent, to a tentative teenager. When I was unattractive, I�d learned that it was best not to make waves or draw unnecessary attention, so as to avoid the worst of the ridicule. Suddenly though, society gave me permission to be one of those outgoing people who others admired. Attractiveness can�t give you an interesting personality, but it does allow you to make the most of what you have.

The change was heady. I�d gone from courting invisibility, when it seemed that all I could get was negative attention, to being able to command as much attention as I wanted, and sometimes even more than that. It was not a change that I was prepared for. I couldn�t do it in a dignified manner. I hadn�t learned how to be cool around men. It wasn�t in my nature to be self-assured and confident. Really, I felt like a fraud, like a child playing at being an adult. I always expected somebody to come up to me and question my existence. And I had so many questions: Why did men buy me drinks? Why did people smile when they saw me? What about me was so good that I deserved all of this? Did I deserve this?

I�m uncomfortable with how I got here. Attractiveness isn�t a test that I studies for, or a paper I BS-ed. It�s not a payment or a reward for anything that I�ve done. It�s not thing more than an accident, or G-d�s whimsy, or a chance genetic arrangement. I don�t trust it, yet I find myself relying on it. I smile at men in bars. I find myself strutting once I�d had a few drinks or two, and I know that regardless of what direction I turn my head in, somebody will be looking at me appreciatively. Disconcerting, for sure, but also exciting. I feel like an imposter, but I also want to enjoy the benefits until I�m found it. No matter what I see in the mirror, I know that there is a me who has never grown out of her ugly, awkward stage. She looks at the current me and barely dares breathe, lest she disturb the pleasant reflection.

The thing is, I have nothing to do with how I look. My very inability to dictate my appearance is both liberating and confining. I�m free to accept or reject how my physicality inclines people to respond to me. I work hard not to be taken for an airhead, and I am more proud than ever of my academic achievements, perhaps because smart is no longer the first that that one assumes about me. Still, more often than not, I choose to accept, without protest or reservation, people�s reactions to me.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about my looks is the possibility that they could be lost at any moment. Although I will probably never fully trust in my own attractiveness, for the most part, I have grown to count on it. Still, the social anxiety that I used to face � �Will they laugh at me?� �does pop up from time to time, perhaps just to keep me humble. I recognize though, that my looks could be taken from me. This could happen due to an accident, something I cannot foresee, or because of the passage of time, something I cannot control. How could I go back to the invisibility and pain, after spending time as one of the loved, the chosen, the sought after? It has been difficult enough to go from being one of the lowly to one of the high, and I am quite unsure as to whether I could bear to make the reverse trip.