I am more than a pretty face

In going on all these dates, I get tired of the word ” pretty” getting thrown around.  It’s nice someone thinks that of me ( and most of the time I can never tell how sincere it is ) but all of that is beside the point.

I am not just pretty. Ugly. White. Multicultural. Fat. Big breasted. Intelligent. Ditzy. Klutzy. Funny. Sad. Drama Queen. Three degrees. Painter. Singer. Writer. Failure. Triumph. SPirit. Service. Winged flight.

I am more than these things. Much more. I am not just one thing or what your perception of me is. The truth is, what is beauty? Is beauty truly the same for everyone? Are smells all uniformly delicious?
Of course not. We are all so diverse, so enigmatic, so complex that beauty, true beauty is only from the spirit.
Generosity? That is pretty. That will always be pretty.

I see myself , and I do not want people to love me for one thing. I don’t want to be defined by it, shaped by it created by it.
I am scared of the label pretty , more than I was of ugly. Ugly can be beautiful but pretty? That can get ugly very fast.
Those bloated, plastic covered women on television. Holding on to what was.
I love makeup, but I can see how it fades after a time. I can see how if you look closely anyone can be ugly.
Words, they are just words. Am I crazy for wanting more? HOw many times do people call me pretty, or not pretty enough… or maybe pretty or too old to be pretty. How many times do I get women looking down at me putting me down? My sisters, trying to become better by stepping over others?
How many times do I see a girl look down in shame because she isn’t pretty enough so she goes to every corner on the internet to get people to love her to adore her so she becomes the paper mannequin . She moulds herself, shapes herself becomes part of a world that Never Enough is a slogan. Where we delve so deeply into our selves, so entrenched in our own individualism we don’t see how much we need to help each other, how much we need community. We are so caught up in our own reflection that we don’t see the neighbor wanting to give us soup when we are sick. The stranger who smiles at us for no good reason but because she wants others to be happy. The street musician singing a melody that should be in stadiums but is only on a dark street corner. No, we do not see this. We see only if someone is pretty. We see if soemone dresses right or talks the right way.
We extol our Gods, the Celebrities, and look for them to be our height of perfection and underneath their podium are hundreds pulling the strings. And we swallow ourselves in debt trying to be be be be , be the paper mannequin.
And in the end really who is looking ? Who is really seeing us for who we are?
I am more than a pretty face. Look into my eyes. I am more than just what you desire, or don’t desire or what YOU want. We are human beings and we can all share our knowledge, that tiny drop we have accumulated on this earth. That one clear concise moment of clarity that we know, that spark of spirit.

 

 

The Effects of Excessive Individualism

When someone gets to college, when you are a teenager, before you get married ( bachelor parties) we are taught that the rite of passage is excessive hedonism at the cost of other individuals. We are taught that we ” only live once” and to be young and ” free ” to experiment before we get ” tied down”

Another example is through an artist’s depiction to be so excessively to be so unbridled in the freedom to express at the cost of other’s wellbeing. When we are surrounded by a sense that we should care about ourselves above anyone else.
On a contradictory note, we are also taught the paradigm of blindly following the status quo. The media teaches us suffocating collectivism to think a certain way, to be a certain way to have a certain fashion and mindset. It makes us believes we are individuals but we are really just part of the status quo. We are taught to accept things as normal…

If you watch MTV with an honest eye and compare it to five years ago, you are shocked at the graphic imagery portrayed, and we are forced as a collective to accept this. We are force fed ideas by our society without properly investigating the effect this has on our collective identity. We do not take responsiblity for things, but rather see things in terms of isolated events. We yearn acceptance from our peers so we no longer try to break free from these ideals.

In consuming media, about how we can just graciously accept that our only answer to solving problems is to consume. The society as a whole , despite pertaining to collective freedoms, does not react well when it goes adverse to what they are promoting.

We are taught in school that we can only be succesful through competition. We are taught in life that we should go to work, get a job , get a family and be part of the system. If we go against this we are being irresponsible, naive and backward. This suffocating collectivism causes us to impede our own sense of self and judgement and moral character.

All of these things block individual expression and ideas, block our sense of empowerment of doing things for ourselves, blocks us as a society to work as a collective unit, blocks our sense of wellbeing and our sense of trying to unite as a collective whole .

I firmly believe in the power of that at our core, we are all spiritual beings , and we must begin to care for all of us, we must constantly seek to know things without forcing on each other’s ideals. By celebrating diversity, we can create significant change. All of this is an organic process of growth for which we experiment and find methods , we reflect and continue to take action to find ways for significant growth.

This all sounds excessively intellectual. But it means that in our everyday life, we need to find ways to prefer others before ourselves and to constantly try and find new solutions to things, instead of blindly accepting paradigms.
…every day we are growing and learning new branches and facets of how to create a better society. It’s pretty amazing.