Beauty Is Choosing To Love

I used to take ballet classes. Every week I’d put on my little pink shoes, wrinkled like pruney skin where canvas met elastic. I’d roll on a pair of uncomfortable white tights and pad onto the linoleum floors of a local ballet studio, where an elegant former ballerina with an impeccable scarlet bun would teach us stretches, jumps, and twirls with French names that I couldn’t keep straight. I was the biggest girl in class. I was self-conscious about my moon face, my big belly, and my lumpy legs. At seven. I hated feeling like an elephant every time I tried to do a jump at the barre, landing so hard on the linoleum that the floor basically trembled. Out of breath constantly. The teacher’s well-meaning voice telling us to suck in, align our spines, until I just needed to curl up in a big fleshy ball on the floor and take a nap to forget about how huge I felt in that studio. It did not help that the studio had wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, so that my burgeoning self-hatred had ample room to rise like a bowl of spitefully bubbling yeast.

I quit ballet when I started middle school. Part of it was that the students at my level were now required to attend class four times a week, and I was not about to subject myself to that on top of the new academic course load. I told myself: if I could not be light, graceful, and willowy, I would be studious. I at least always had that going for me. Little miss smart, little miss mature, little miss studying Encyclopedia Britannica and E=mc squared in the middle of fourth grade social studies. (On some level I knew I must be playing into an Asian stereotype, but I didn’t care anymore. It only took me a few years of being alive to get hungry for love, even if that love came in the form of appreciation for how much I crammed into my brain. As if each fact was a grain of rice, and I was only worth as much as the bowl was deep.) I became a top student. I wore clothes that didn’t make me feel amazing, but were functional, and I told myself that was enough. I scorned the experiments with fashion and makeup that my tween peers were trying, and told myself that all I needed was in my head. I adopted a fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude towards confidence: I smiled big, shut up about my feelings, and focused on what was right in front of me. When my first boyfriend abused my trust and took things further than I gave consent for, I channeled the insecurities gushing out of me like blood into rage at the person he moved on to onto next. I feigned confidence, in the form of attack. When my friends told me I was disgusting after he bragged about his actions (even though they knew I hadn’t wanted it), I applied to a high school where I knew they wouldn’t follow me. My mantra was,: “I don’t need you”. Pervertedly, I found a kind of confidence through this — the knowledge that I had the power to start things over. I had agency in what I could change, and I forced myself to focus on those things and not on what I craved but had no confidence in my ability to achieve (i.e. beauty and love).

This self-restraint actually saved me. I compartmentalized the parts of me that screamed irrational criticism about my physical appearance and my unstable personality. I focused on finding things to love — music, art, literature, idols — and amazingly, it actually worked. I had spent so long trying to be a social chameleon, and I had interrupted the process of finding out who I am. By discovering new favorites (Riot Grrrl, musical theatre, indie artists) and new role models (Regina Spektor, Awkwafina, Janelle Monaé) I started figuring out how to be a human instead of a ghost girl — a paper cutout ready to paint herself in the favorite colors of the people she wanted to impress. I learned that love is a daily choice more than a feeling, whether for a person, an interest, or oneself, and I began to choose to love the things that loved me back.

Confidence, or what I think might be confidence, has come along pretty naturally since then, but it’s no destination — it’s absolutely a journey. Being empowered by others has given me the ability to empower myself through creativity and, yes, sometimes forced but necessary self-appreciation. My confidence and I take care of each other: I feed it through the development of my personhood; it holds up my body daily and carries me through my anxieties. I still have chunky thighs. I still have a moon face and an only irregularly visible jawline. I have tangled hair, a big belly, back problems, dry skin, and yellow teeth. And I try to pour my love into confidence instead of rage; not into my still-constant anxieties, but into appreciation for my ability to take up space in this universe; into my capacity to fuck up harmlessly; into my big beautiful bod and my lanky sitting posture and my brain and my face and my voice and my heart. And I don’t take myself all that seriously. Which helps too.