Shine Bright Like a Diamond: Unfastening The Dark Side of The Beauty Conversation

By k. Neycha Herford

 

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I admit it. I am beautiful.

 

There was a time that I would have been certain to preface such a statement with full disclosure that I dye my hair, spank my belly when I deem it necessary, conceal my under-eye dark circles (mostly when I’m going to be in the company of those I’m unfamiliar with) and go braless because the effects of gravity had their way with my breasts a long time ago. But this is not that time. There is no complimentary chaser of self-deprecation being offered. I no longer apologize for being beautiful; I’ll come to that later.

 

It’s a prickly little word, isn’t it? Beauty. It’s so loaded with all kinds of touchy issues on every side that I’ve found myself tempted to do the kind of tip-toeing I use to be a pro at in elementary and high school as well as college - long before I stopped caring. In spite of my vocation in the self-help arena, I am not here to rep the billion dollar self-help industry's aggressive habit of serving super-sized cliche’s and half-truths like McDonald’s Happy Meals just to placate you.

 

I hope to offer you something much more lasting, a compass pointing in the direction of your own exquisite beauty and tools for owning that beauty in a grand way - without apology; but not before we address the bullshit thoughts and behaviors that get in the way.

 

Beauty Is As Beauty Thinks

First things first, let’s be clear. Beauty does not come from within. Beauty is who we are. It is animated by robust self-worth. It is the spiritual magic of our divine essence radiating. Beauty is not only skin deep. Beauty is everything. Beauty is not as beauty does. Beauty is as beauty thinks. When the mind is polluted with self-doubt, feeling beautiful is hard to come by - no matter how you look.

 

Low Self-Worth - The Missing Conversation

Every woman in the United States is subjected to a daily beauty pageant, whether she signs up for it or not. Hammered by photo-shopped, idealized western standards of beauty, women and girls have an increasingly difficult time escaping feeling judged by their appearance. Add to it the highly stylized and curated online lives posted in full color on various forms of social media and you’re left with women who consistently compare themselves, feel inadequate and chronically insecure or as one of my clients likes to say, are suffering with a “case of the uglies.”

 

The issue of the media serving up these ‘Stepford Wives versions’ of regular women is not new, but the extent to which its pervasiveness is triggering old wounds in women is an increasing problem. The steady drone of socially constructed ideas of beauty is wreaking psychological havoc on women in ways that have far outpaced the types of raw and meaningful conversations we’ve been willing to have.

 

While certainly guilty of perpetuating an obsession with beauty, the media is not responsible for the core problem. It is what we believe about ourselves, informed by the experiences of our upbringing that shape our self-worth, the real problem. Yet, as is so often the case, folks want to tackle the surface problem rather than address the core. They want a quick fix rather than healing, to be undisturbed rather than transformed.

 

It’s Not Just The Media Stupid, It’s You

Truth is we essentially want to airbrush the real problem, make it more one dimensional and easily approachable than it really is. To pretend that somehow if we can police the media - print, television and social - that we will somehow wake up tomorrow morning miraculously feeling better about ourselves is the easy conversation. Looking at how your own screwed up sense of self impacts how you treat yourself and other women along with the incredible ugliness it fosters is not.

 

There’s too much focus on suppressing the media without placing enough significance on achieving true solidarity among women. Susan Shapiro Barish, author of Tripping The Prom Queen, writes, “We’ll do anything rather than face up to female envy and jealousy - especially our own.” What she discovered from her study of 500 heterosexual women of varied ages, races, and background, is that “competition between women is more vicious precisely because it is covert.” We desperately want the media and everyone else to honor us. But we don’t honor each other.

 

Yet if we hope to free ourselves in any measurable way from such troubled feelings about beauty, we have to address the staggering feelings of “not enoughness” that plague most women.

 

Self-pity Is Hella Unattractive

If you don’t believe your mental health has a direct impact on how you feel about yourself, especially the three stars of what I like to call the “kick-ass woman tote bag” - otherwise known as self-worth, self-esteem and self-confidence, then you must like shroomin’. Denial is a powerful drug.

 

Consider this. During my fifteen years in private practice, I’ve had all kinds of women sit on my sofa; thin, obese, black, white, “light-skinned”, “dark-skinned”, middle-aged, under twenty. Some have been striking, others just ridiculously gorgeous. All have been undeniably and uniquely beautiful. No matter the diversity, one thing arrested and connected them all - a fragile self-concept, burdened by flimsy self-worth.

 

Feelings of not good enough or low self-worth impacts everyone regardless of size, skin color, height, social status, income, etc. It castrates any possibility of having an authentic experience of beauty, consistently. For those that believe their particular misgivings give them full license to constantly drive in the “I get to feel the worst” lane, get over yourself. Self-pity is hella unattractive and poisons far too many of us.

 

It’s All BS! Stop It.

“You’re pretty for a dark-skinned girl” is no more fucked up than someone turning to you in amazement and saying, “you’re really nice for a pretty girl”. I know because I was constantly referred to in a derogatory manner as one of those "high-yellow, red-bone, good hair, pretty girls" growing up. Sadly I came to learn the hard way that if I didn't play small almost immediately in new social settings, I would have hell to pay.

 

I was picked on so much that my mother transferred me to a different high school without my consent, believing she was protecting me rather than considering she was moving me away from the few friends I could count on to a new lion’s den to face the music all over again.

 

Burdened by the ridiculous “privileges” inherited from being ‘mixed with slavery’ - as we sorely call it in my neck of the woods in Virginia, I had the "I'm nothing, gigantic smile, overzealous kindness routine" down to a science. That shuck and jive stance cost me dearly in the end. It took me years to realize the damage I’d done to my own self-concept and that no matter much how shade was thrown my way, I’d done nothing to deserve it other than be myself.

 

How long will we demonize others for looking different and expect the media pimping fockery machine to care about our self-concept? In order to matter to others, we must first demonstrate mattering to ourselves.

 

No One Wins When We Play Small

I read a post recently where a friend wrote, “people don’t mind too much if you’re beautiful as long as you act like you don’t know it.” Ouch! I felt sad for her. I felt sad for my adolescent self. I felt profound sorrow for all the ways we put ourselves down in order to distance ourselves from unnecessary attention and drama. Truth is no one wins when we play small.

 

When we accept our power and applaud our beauty we give others permission to do the same. If you’re moving in a circle of women where that’s a problem, then you need to trade in those “friends” with a quickness.

 

By sharing our stories as women, not the awkward 11 year-olds inside, there is a unifying nature of realizing that we are not alone. We can seize the opportunity to collectively heal rather than continue tearing each other down.

 

We can put foolishness behind us, and carry on with addressing the needs we all share: to be seen, appreciated, respected, cared for - to have it made clear that we matter and to know first hand our beauty.

 

With that in mind, I recommend the following:

 

1. Change The Channel, Go Within

A recognition of your own beauty can’t even really enter the conversation while you’re focused on what somebody else looks like, how the media tells you to look, or the way Timmy teased you in the third grade for not looking a certain way. All of this external focus is part of the core problem that keeps us feeling so horrible about ourselves. Change your channel to focus on you.

 

2. Take Responsibility, Protect Your Hood

It is not the sole responsibility of the media and its cohorts to heal your issues any more than it is a teacher’s job to absolve the parents of all responsibility for the child’s habit of acting out in class everyday. No matter what they’re selling, it is you that has to give the illusion authority to become an accepted truth in your life. You must choose with discretion the ideas you entertain. I’m asking you to take responsibility for yourself. It’s the only thing for which you’ll ever have the authority to change.

 

3. Commit To Healing

You must develop a laser focus that is attuned to your pain places; those psychological scars inherited and left over from childhood. You may have learned them in the home, in the classroom, on the playground or at summer camp. However, it is a new day, and those experiences belong in your past - not here in the present causing emotional catastrophes all around you. Don’t you get tired of beating up on yourself? It’s exhausting mentally, physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually disrespectful. I often imagine the divine, our master painter, reflecting to us our perfectly imperfect image asking, “can’t you see how beautiful I made you, what are you stupid?”

 

Ladies, it is crucial that you attend to those scars in a focused and formal way with the same fervor you pursue keeping your wig done and your nails polished. Commit to whatever type of healing path that speaks to you - whether therapy, spirituality, philosophy, mythology, religion or creativity. A genuine investment in a process will facilitate transforming the way you feel about yourself and in the best instances help you to have the deeply intimate experience of not only seeing your exquisite beauty, but also of feeling beautiful.

 

4. Update Your Playlist

No matter how impolite or discouraging others may be or have been toward you that makes you feel bad, nothing compares to the mean shit you keep on repeat in your head like a bad pop song. Start singing a new tune, a love song if you will, to yourself; a song that reminds you that you are exquisite, unique and like no other soul on this planet. How amazing! Sing a song that retunes your vibration to one of self-love, self-compassion and self-respect for the spectacular purpose for which you were created. You my dear are more than you see, capable of much more than you believe.

 

5. Do You Boo Boo

When you’re in touch with what makes you distinctly you, it permeates on the outside. You have every right to celebrate that in a way that makes you smile. If

that’s rocking stilettos, red lipstick, a weave to your ankles, a pushup bra, or padded butt panties, makes no difference. You are not here to waste your precious energy trying to please others. You are here to occupy your space on the planet in a grand way that is reflective of the awesome human being that you are.

 

6. Not Inner Beauty or Outer Beauty, It’s Fawsome Baby!

I call the Penthouse of self-worth - where inner and outer beauty integrate to something truly transcendent - the zone of fawsome. Fucking awesome! When you close your eyes and see inward, you are able to identify with your inherent divinity. When you identify with your inherent divinity, you can’t help but taste the deliciousness. When you taste the deliciousness, you can’t help but feel good. When you feel good, you can’t help but have that radiate on the outside. And darling, when you are full of radiance, you have entered the zone of muthafreakin’ fawsome!

 

Define Yourself

There is no doubt that beauty and aesthetics, much like race and social status cast a broad, dark shadow. It is what it is. Acknowledge it. Just don’t be defined by it.

 

Let us instead close the door on the outdated descriptions of beauty and find new language - a language that celebrates authentic, remarkable, engaging, powerful, warm, kind. Own your zone of fawsome! It will provide you with the will and skill to manhandle the constant exposure to the manic screams of the media, the well-meaning self-help campaigns put forth by socially conscious and women-centric corporations, as well as the righteous sistas and brothas carrying on about about inner beauty vs. outer beauty, light skin vs. dark skin, good or permed hair vs. natural hair.

 

Know that in your zone of fawsome, you are no longer bound to the toxic and dualistic definition of inner/outer beauty. You will instead be attending to your own self-definition like a boss!

 

My wish for you:

May you live with ease.
May you live with self-compassion.
May you live with light in your eyes, love in your heart.

 

Let prayer become your beautiful Lover.
Let the experience of beauty become your constant companion.

 

Pledge allegiance to self-acceptance.

 

I encourage you to begin each morning in the mirror, borrowing the words of the great Sufi Poet Hafiz, and ask yourself, “My dear, how can I be more loving to you? How can I be more kind?”