The Rise and Fall of Pretty

Flushed with the excitement of new love and the rapture of a beautiful spring day, I emerged from my walk-in closet, hair impeccably set, body wrapped entirely in vintage, and declared that I needed my picture taken-- this was the best I was going to look for the rest of my life. I was 22, in the throws of the most passionate love affair of my life, living in the most beautiful space in my life, and I knew then, for a fleeting moment, I had peaked. 

A few years before this closet epiphany, during my first year away from home, I remember standing in my dorm bedroom listening to my roommates speak in hushed tones about someone, saying:

 "she's like really pretty and she, like, doesn't even realize it." 

When they cut their conversation short as I entered the room, I realized they'd been talking about me.

This was the first moment in my adult life another woman had called me-- not my hair, not my clothes-- pretty.

Step back to fifth grade, a dark rollerskating rink and a group of boys seated along the carpeted wall. It was a friend's birthday and I was wearing my new Victoria's Secret jeans with the burnout floral design and feeling more like an adult than I ever had. On our second pass by the boys, they called after my friend skating just ahead of me, who wittily (I thought at the time) replied, "in your dreams." As I passed, I did the same tacking on a less-than-clever "yeah" to the front of the statement. One of the boys spat back to me, "in our nightmares."

 I had felt pretty that day with my new jeans on and with three words it was all undone. 

It was the first time I had ever felt ugly and it was the first time I understood that some girls are desirable and some are not. 

Rewind once more to childhood and the beauty pageants and commercial shoots my mother involved me in. If I'm surprised at how much "pretty" has mattered to me, I shouldn't be. Though I was given plenty of opportunities to enrich myself academically, pageants were the only place I'd ever been encouraged to compete. Early on it was obvious to me that appearance mattered, not just to my mother who involved me in these contests, but to the world.

I never did win a pageant.

. . .

The rise and fall of "pretty" can be easily charted in my life. 

It's a short journey. 

After an early childhood of trying to sell my appearance, I spent so much of my adolescence rejecting pretty and, essentially, trying to make myself as conventionally unattractive as possible. 

Somewhere along the way, probably thanks to those skating rink boys, I had garnered the notion that "pretty" wasn't something that was available to me, no matter how hard I tried. 

My untameable hair and bad skin was proof that pretty just wasn't in the cards for me.

 If I couldn't be pretty, I decided, I'd be something else. Weird, scary... whatever I was was to be a test for everyone else. If they could get beyond my less than appealing exterior, they might be worth my time. 

I'm not sure when, exactly, I actually started trying to be pretty but I do know it was largely encouraged by the opposite sex. During those early college years, I discovered just how good the male gaze could feel. 

Living in a big city and hanging around places where more people looked like me (looking at you Velvet Underground) my outward appearance stopped acting as the defense mechanism it was designed as and suddenly, in the right light, I looked appealing.

Buoyed by male attention and the kind whispers of my roommates, I understood that maybe pretty was within reach after all. 

The shearing of my dreadlocks in my second year of college marked a turning point in my appearance, one that, for years, I felt was the best thing to ever happen to me.

My personal style had been in transition since my senior year in high school and with new hair, the discovery of a great thrift shop on Queen Street, and what I felt was an uncanny resemblance to it-girl Clara Bow, the door was opened to vintage glamour. 

  With hair and red lipstick less like Robert Smith and more like Rita Hayworth, I found myself the object of the male gaze much more frequently. Another particularly rapturous spring day, while walking to class, a man in a fancy black car pulled over, handed me his card, and told me I was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen and he'd like to get coffee with me sometime. 

I never called him but that moment is forever crystallized in my mind. 

I lived off that moment for months. 

That was such a dark and lonely time in my life and that was such a bright spot.         

I was so beautiful I stopped traffic.

Someone wanted me. 

Pretty carried me through college. I rode high on my own inflated ego and the flurry of attention that surrounded me once I transferred to a smaller school. Thinking back to that time, the attention was exhilarating: being wanted, crushed on, persued, was absolutely intoxicating. 

I chased that feeling for years after that closet moment, in fact, this blog in its first incarnation, traces that part of the arc. The title, Sailing Over a Cardboard Sea," is completed by the lyric "but it wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me" and is a pretty good example of where my head was at when I first started writing here. The "you" I had in mind was most definitely male, but really anyone that would peer through this curated window into my life, admire my appearance, and make it real, make me pretty.

Now, eleven years after starting this blog,  nearly twelve since feeling the peak of pretty, I'm ready to bury it all and move on. The pursuit of pretty over the last decade has left me feeling like an uninteresting husk, devoid of personality-- is it possible I  was so consumed by my own appearance I forgot to cultivate a personality? 

The answer is yes.

 As the years pass, I'm increasingly aware of the war that time, poor care, and less-than-optimal health has waged on my once-prized exterior. 

More and more, I'm aware of my increasing resemblance to a toad.

 My chronically downturned mouth is proof that if you make a face long enough, it does, in fact, stay like that. 

Where other women might develop what is colloquially known as resting bitch face, mine is a resting toad. 

Certainly, there are still times when I feel pretty, where I can jump into that old mindset of expecting to be fawned over and admired, but I'll catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and see the lumps and bumps of my nearly-middle-aged toady facade, and realize I'm beyond all that now. 

I can feel good in what I wear and how I look without being "pretty" --I'm worth more than that.

In tracing the rise and fall of pretty, I have to say I'm a bit surprised to find that I'm back in familiar territory so soon. While this latitude of "unpretty" was a scary place in the past, I've now got the armor of decades of living to protect me from phrases like "in our nightmares." 

I'm no longer competing with anyone to be desirable and the pageant stage is long behind me.

 A man's opinion of my outward appearance doesn't have the hold over me it once did.

I just don't care. 

Pretty may no longer be as available to me as it once was, but I, thankfully, no longer want it. 

 It's time to be something else and embrace it, warts and all.    

R