On Beauty

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I was over forty years old before I realized I was beautiful—right about the time many people might believe that a woman’s beauty begins to fade.

I remember sitting in grade school, awkward and shy, with a unique sense of imposed style that often got me ridiculed, imagining that someday—when I was much older—I would be beautiful. It wasn’t a thought I dwelled on or fully understood at the time, but it lingered quietly, a small ember of knowing: someday, I would be beautiful.

Like many women, beauty was a concept shaped for me long before I could define it for myself. Growing up between two sisters—one a beauty queen and the other a model—comments about their beauty filled my childhood. When I was older, I was told that no one had called me beautiful as a child because they feared it would make me vain. But withholding that affirmation didn’t protect me; instead, it left me clinging to the idea of beauty as something elusive, something I did not have.

I was taught, like so many women, that beauty was both a target and a talisman—something that made you desired yet dangerous. Beauty was a rare and special gift, but being attractive came with risks. If I was mistreated, it was because I was attractive; if I was treated well, it was because I was beautiful. The world decided what I was based on arbitrary measures: my features, my clothing, my inherent energy—or their own desire. To make things even more complicated, I was also taught that attractiveness measured beauty, creating a vicious circle of proof and doubt.

As a young girl, I watched the women around me obsess over beauty, unable to see themselves clearly. What was made clear was that beauty was a measure of my worth as a woman. For a time, I rejected this script outright. I butchered my hair, shopped at thrift stores, and avoided mirrors for years. I didn’t want beauty to matter. I wanted to escape the exhausting pressure of whether I was—or wasn’t—beautiful. I wanted to leave behind the unwinnable battle

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Yet, even as I pushed against these standards, I felt beauty everywhere. It wasn’t in my reflection or the carefully curated ideals thrust upon me. It was in the way light danced across a field, in the raw emotion of a poem, in the silent prayer of a sunset. My heart knew that beauty wasn’t just an external trait but a sacred language—a way to experience and create.

But the idea of me as beautiful was too painful to explore. It wasn’t until much later that something shifted. One morning, quite literally, I woke up and saw myself clearly: a body worthy of adornment, a face etched with stories, a presence that had been quietly beautiful all along. I decided to embrace the artful expression of beauty through my own physical form.

I understand now why I avoided this for so long—because once I started to express my beauty, I had to contend with the expectations and projections of others. The world didn’t just see me; it interpreted me, often through the lens of its own desires, fears, and biases. I had to navigate the discomfort of being both visible and vulnerable—of having my beauty simultaneously celebrated and scrutinized. It forced me to confront the ways beauty could be weaponized against me, how it could invite admiration and resentment in equal measure.

But despite the challenges, I began to see that expressing my beauty was less about how others received it, more about reclaiming it as my own, and, even more profoundly, as a sacred act—a way of honoring the divine.

What I’ve learned is this: beauty is not confined to perfect symmetry or flawless youth. It is the resilience in our eyes, the kindness in our smile, the courage to take up space in a world that often asks us to shrink.

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Beauty is not something we need to chase or earn. It is intrinsic, already ours. It is how the divine speaks through us. And the tragic but common inability to appreciate it for what it is cannot be fixed by avoiding its expression or dampening its flame.

And yet, women remain caught in a paradox. We are expected to care enough about beauty to always look good but not so much that it becomes obvious we are trying. We are asked to be effortlessly lovely, as if beauty is an accident of existence rather than the result of care, cultivation, and self-respect—as though care, cultivation, and self-respect would somehow limit our beauty rather than reveal it.

When we believe that beauty is owned by external standards, we lose sight of its origin as one of the most precious things in the universe. We forget that our beauty, in all its forms, is a gift we give to the world.

We live in a world that commodifies beauty, defines it narrowly, and sells it back to us. But true beauty cannot be packaged. It is wild, uncontainable, and uniquely ours. It grows in the cracks of imperfection, in the places where we allow ourselves to live authentically. It is nourished through our care and embellished with our love. We may decorate it with high heels or Birkenstocks, but the truth remains: our beauty deserves to be honored—not declared as a reaction to a world of abuse and misunderstanding, but expressed from the full knowledge of its magnificence.

So, sometime after forty, I began to see the beauty I had known was possible as a child. The beauty she somehow knew was not about how I looked or how the world responded to me, but rather the result of a courageous heart willing to bring the sacred feminine into being—right here and now, whenever and as much as possible.

It is not flawless, but it is real. 

And true beauty doesn’t demand that we be anything other than who we are. It only asks us to honor the luminous, intricate, sacred beings we’ve always been. 

My prayer for each and every woman is that we know our own beauty so deeply that it sings our heart through our skin and lifts the corners of our eyes with love.

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