Beautiful

When I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself as beautiful.

It’s hard to look at myself sometimes. I critique – is that a double chin I’m developing? Ooh, I look like a pizza face, I have so many zits. I feel like my back is enormous – why do I have to look like I have boobs on my back too? I see myself in pictures online, and I untag myself on Facebook if I think I don’t look just right.

I’m sure there are tons of women who get this feeling. As I go to the gym, I watch women in the morning standing at the mirror for 20 minutes, making sure that they get their curls just so, pouting their lips as they put on their makeup. We struggle for it. We seem to have to fight to feel comfortable within ourselves.

Jewish women come with a whole mess of beauty issues. Typically we fight with our dark curly hair and our noses. Nothing seems to be right enough, whether we look too Jewish or we don’t look Jewish enough (or in my case, I don’t look Sephardic enough). For example, my grandmother longed to be a busty blonde her entire life. She also wanted to be tall. However, despite her longings, she was perfectly wonderful just the way she was.

We have been conditioned: Fat equals ugly. Young is preferable to old. Blonde is better. Our locks should be lustrous and we should be picture perfect when we wake up in the morning. We should even look perfect when we work out. I have seen girls in full-makeup mode at the gym, right down to the lip gloss. If I have any makeup on at the gym, it’s what I was wearing the night before to go out and didn’t take off.

Our quest for beauty does more harm than good. Eating disorders run rampant, from overeating to anorexia and bulimia. It disables people from functioning properly. I have watched my sister beat herself up over countless years over her weight, delaying her life by saying, “When I lose 75 pounds, I will do [something she could do without losing 75 pounds].” She longs for how skinny she was back in high school. She yearns for a past look.

But let’s face it: When I look at a reflection of myself, with my size 20 jeans and big boned tall body that makes me tower over other women like a giant, I feel out of place. My sister’s insecurities may have prevented her from living a full life like I have had, but we all still have them.

I grew up in a time where Britney Spears was the ideal of what a girl should look like – sexy, six-packed and blonde. I grew up in a town called Thousand Oaks, where girls wore short skirts in order to get the teachers to give them As in their classes and were wearing stiletto heels that made them look like porn stars. It was uncomfortable, particularly when I experienced a 40-pound weight gain in my junior year.

The pressure didn’t stop at home. My mother, who has struggled with her weight, longed for the days where my body used to resemble Gwyneth Paltrow’s (I don’t). She couldn’t accept that I could be perfectly happy in a body that doctor’s didn’t qualify as a normal weight. She’s not the only one – I see the way that I am judged and viewed differently because of my size. The people who love me don’t care, but it is hard to approach people being me.

My struggle to feel beautiful has consumed me over the years, even as I left my parents’ home to make my own. Yet, unlike my sister, it never got in the way of living. I was meant to live. It’s the spirit that my grandmother instilled in me as a child. We are so much alike, she and I – lovely and perfectly happy people on the outside, brimming with so much life it spills on everyone else. Despite that, on the inside we longed to be the things we never would be.

It’s 10 years since high school. I have found my own identity and try my best to take care of myself. Yet as I look in fashion magazines, I am haunted by the perception of beauty. I feel like a strange freak in this world, not fitting into one community or another, not feeling beautiful and not knowing how I should feel. No matter how many times my husband says that I am gorgeous, I can’t find it in me.

And yet, it is comforting to know that on top of the pop charts right now there is a size 16 soul singer from England with the country’s number one album and a self-proclaimed monster on top of the single’s chart (for the record, that would be Adele and Lady Gaga). The Daily Beast proclaimed the end of the pop princess, where image was everything in lieu of the talent.

I was reminded that it’s the gifts that we give to the world that matter more than how we appear to everyone. Yes, there is a lot of emphasis on our beauty as women, but what ever happened to our brains, our senses of humor or our hearts? Why should we care about being able to turn people on when the best thing in the world is to stimulate the intellect? What ever happened to finding success and going beyond physical appearances, but making the best of it? It is important to be healthy, but I don’t think it matters what size jeans I wear, as long as I feel comfortable in them. We lose ourselves in vanity sometimes, and we need a reminder to who we are, and that we are such special people. We need to have that kick in the head to tell us that those who love us will do so no matter what we look like.

So when I look in the mirror, I will stare into my green eyes and remind myself that no matter what I think of my body that I am beautiful in more ways than one. And that’s what really matters. After all, in the words of that number one hit of the week, “I was born to survive… I was born to be brave… I was born this way.”