No. 003 • My God is Beauty

It’s time to book my next botox appointment. I’m 41, and my forehead wrinkles have slowly crept back into position. Unacceptable. The world demands we reach for perfection (whatever that is) and so we do. It’s unmerciful to those who don’t. I can’t handle a more unmerciful world right now. The older I get, and the more I inventory my life, the closer I get to recognizing that what I’ve been chasing my whole life is actually worship of a god who has sunk her way into every crevice of me. My god is Beauty.

I think I was born loving art. Drawing, painting, making things. My mom would sometimes sit with me and complete a drawing of full, green landscapes. Trees and rolling hills crafted with crayons or pencils completed in 10 minutes. She is an artist, whether or not she considers herself one. When I was a teenager my obsession for skincare began. I've moisturized every day since. I started loving clothes and fashion. By the time I was in college I had folders of fashion spreads, downloaded from niche slow-loading websites, saved on the hard drive of my chunky black MacBook. I dyed my hair every three weeks. Tinted my lashes and brows. Sat in a tanning bed every day. Every. Day. A choice I’m bound to pay for at some point. Although, I do think there is some magic in taking a sweaty 20-minute nap in the artificial sun. In college, I worked as a freelance makeup artist at a few MAC counters across Dallas. I loved makeup. It was another way to paint. I wasn’t painting much then outside of strangers’ faces. More clothes. More tanning. I began shaving my head around twenty-five. My god cursed me with thinning hair. Exercise not for health, but to keep my body in shape. I must be desirable. I started getting botox around thirty. Tens of thousands of dollars spent. Appearances must be kept.

They will tell you that beauty is a lesser god. Intelligence. Character. Creativity. Knowledge. Those are the gods worth worship. Those are the things that really matter. Beauty is the shallow option for the unenlightened. Only vapid people seek beauty. You grow out of it. There is nothing to gain from it. Those other gods though. They are the ladder to a higher plane. I believed it.

You get to the beach and smell the ocean. Hear the waves crashing. The breeze is perfect. You lay out your towel on your lounge chair, sit and start putting on sunscreen. The smell of the sun is in the air. Maybe you add a nice tanning oil onto your skin and start roasting. It gets hot so you go dip in the ocean to cool off. Come back to your chair and lay again until you are dry. Repeat sunscreen and oil. Ocean. Repeat. Sunscreen. Oil. Lay. Ocean. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Until the day is done. You go inside, drape your towel over the balcony railing to dry in the breeze, enjoy a delicious dinner, company, and the best sleep. You start your morning with coffee on the balcony, your towel still there waiting. When you grab it, you smell the previous day. That is the smell.

Beauty is a tricky god. She has so many forms. The immediate reach is to name her physical. The fashion, the makeup, the pretty face, the perception. But she is also the smell of the beach towel. To worship her correctly is to manage your judgment of all her forms. There is no ranking. Something is beautiful or it isn't. A checkmark yes or no. And who is the scorer? Beauty doesn't care about our judgment. She is above it. And yet perception is her entire game. Perceived correctly, all her faces are righteous. But perception can be warped into an ugly thing, and beauty turns on you quickly. Look at the world's obsession with fat asses and giant lips. What are we even doing?

And can beauty be lost? The sunlit smell of a towel most certainly doesn't last. But we know in our memory it existed. Beauty carries on at least there. The same must happen to our physical form. We know beauty lived in us, even as we age out of it. Others knew us then. So we never really lose the beauty of our youth.

All this to say, my worship of beauty has cost me things. Too much money spent on chasing some physical form that I’ll never actually reach. Worry over how my body is perceived. How the things I make will be perceived. About how my perception of beauty fits into the perceptions of others. Stress. Anxiety. Heartache. Jealousy. Rage. She’s given me back more than she took. Experience. Taste. Knowledge. Every single thing that I’ve ever created with my own hands. A desire to leave the world more beautiful than how I’ve experienced it. And in my youth, she gave me the most beautiful tan I’ve ever seen. And that damn towel smell.

And now the rejection of it all. What really is the physical world? Does it even really exist or matter? This whole conversation could be considered vanity. This is a conversation that an "enlightened" person might look at and fully reject. Just like they reject the mirror. But then you also have to reject the towel. They are the same god, different form.

Religion tells you beauty is vanity. The gurus will tell you to let go of the physical. “You are just a meat sack. The mind is all that matters.” That line of thinking can cost you your health. It cost me mine for a time. It can cost you opportunity. We live in a world ruled by appearance. Humans have sought beauty out from the beginning. Shell beads, 142,000 years old. A 51,000-year-old painted pig on a ceiling with a figure in what looks like a headdress. We made ourselves beautiful before we made bread.

Beauty has been the god I’ve worshipped, knowingly or not, my entire life. At one point, I let the world convince me that was vanity. She wasn’t worth worshipping. But the older I get, the more I realize either they are completely wrong, or I simply don’t care. The beautiful things I make will outlast you, me, and both of our ideas of what is worth our worship.