Guess What? I'm Adorable!

This is a picture of me right now. I am not wearing makeup. I did not edit this photo. I don't have any filters like with Instagram because in order to have that I would require a smartphone. I have a dumb phone and a webcam, with which I take selfies these days. It is twelve twenty-three am on the morning (night) of May 25 (May 24). I just got home from a party/gathering/game night deal at a friend's house.

You can't really tell, but I look pretty okay. These are the standards by which I judge "pretty okay":

1. Acne. If I'm having spots on my face, it is automatically downgraded. This is because blemishes, in my opinion, are unsightly and also are signs of stress and hormones. (I think this is probably why people weren't really interested in me in high school, because zits scream "SHE'S CRAZY AND HORMONAL AND WANTS YOUR BABIES MORE THAN SHE WANTS YOU," which is not a healthy attitude to have in high school unless, apparently, you're a creepily overmature junior in high school who falls in love with coincidentally good-looking vampires and werewolves because let's admit it, the imbecile is on both Team Edward and Team Jacob, the UST in that series is unrealistic.) Here in Provo, it automatically becomes fine, which I like because it means I'm free to lust after everybody's babies without feeling guilty about it, a thing that has not happened since I was twelve.)
2. Feeling fat. I have been exercising more often, by which I mean occasionally instead of never. Superwholockmarauder and I have been doing pretty well on this front. I also go to sleep at fairly reasonable hours, weekends excepted, and I eat well and eat regularly. As a result, I feel thinner and prettier than I usually do.
3. Outfit. I have had major clothes envy of basically everyone I know since I was fourteen. It was partially my fault, because I was not proactive in telling my mother what kinds of clothes I liked, and partially my mother's fault, because even though I am a Mormon and therefore already did not wear revealing (read: fashionable) clothing, my mother liked to take it a step further. And really, saying it's her fault is not accurate. I should say it's to her credit, because I spent my high school career decently clothed and covered and uncomfortable when I was not clothed and covered. And I'm not judging you if you like to show a little skin. I'm just severely uncomfortable with it. But I've learned how to pick things I like and also that I have plenty of T-shirts and I don't need anymore, thank you.
4. Hair. It is a truly miraculous day if my hair is cooperating. I have absurdly thick hair. It's very pretty and whenever I let people play with it, which is whenever I have the opportunity, they compliment me on how soft and pretty and clean it is. It's a struggle to keep it that way, because frankly if I didn't have remnants of self-disgust at my first-grade haircut, which was basically a pixie cut, I would just chop the whole mess off and have done with it.

And that list, I know, is this combination of "ew, I am the grossest of God's creations" and "look at me, I'm the most beautiful thing to ever exist and if you say otherwise, I will punch you in the face with my gorgeous fist." But the thing is, that's how we've been raised. We, as women, have been early trained to hate our bodies and wish we looked like the unrealistically anorexic models on the magazine covers.

So this is me, and I am breaking every rule I know of in whatever rules there are, by profoundly stating that I, all things considered, am kind of hot.

No, really. I'm not saying it to make you relieved that I'm finally accepting of my self-image or whatever. I still hate the way I look because it's me. But objectively speaking, I am a babe.

Maybe you're scrolling back up to squint at that picture and decide whether you agree with me or not. Maybe you're suspicious that this is just a way of fishing for compliments. It's really not. I don't care if you think I'm pretty or not. I literally have stopped caring about whether other people think I am attractive. When I get up in the morning to get dressed to go to work at the bookstore, I have this dress code to follow. I am allowed to wear dresses, blouses, skirts, dress pants, nice jeans and only BYU logo T-shirts. Nice casual, basically. And I do. I wear nice casual to work. But other than that standard, I have stopped looking at the mirror and saying, "Man, I wish I looked like such and such so that other people would think I was pretty," and I have started saying, "I am going to look like this today because it will make me feel good about myself and really happy with my body."

Sometimes I look at me as a whole, usually very close up to the mirror, and I look and I see, "Oh, look, you have five thousand zits and your pores are huge and your skin is not uniformly one color under the blemishes and your hair is tangly and weird and what is your mouth even doing right now." But then I back up a few steps, because first of all, the only person who's ever gonna be that close to my face as I am when I stare in the mirror like that is hopefully gonna be about to kiss me, and I kind of doubt they'll be looking at my pores or my zits if they have the inclination to kiss me in the first place. So I look, and I notice that I have some really nice facial features.

• I have nice eyes. They are hazel. Kind of hazel-brown. There's some green in there, kind of an olive shade, and right around the pupil in the middle they're actually gold and around the edges they're dark green. You guys, my eyes belong on an elf or something. Or me, because they're just that awesome.
• I have an adorable little nose. Some people save up money and get nose jobs. I have this really cute little nose that's more than a button but doesn't look like a parrot's beak, and it doesn't curve or anything, it's just there, this adorable little nose on my face.
• I have a nice little mouth. I hate my smile, and I will tell anybody this. But I have nice lips, kind of full, which I get from my mom, and they're a nice color that looks nice on my face without lipstick or other coloring. And my teeth are getting whiter because I've been working hard on them, and I've never had terribly crooked teeth, and I just like my mouth.

And then I back up a little further, and I see the rest of me, too.

• I really do have nice hair. It's an okay color, and it's soft and thick and pretty and clean and people love to play with it. It's got nothing on the Beauty, of course, who has the sort of magnificent mane about which the troubadors sang- but I have nice hair. And it's even nicer when I don't pull it all back into my usual librarian's bun, which is generally what I do with it. And if I am hanging out with you in person, you already have my permission to play with my hair.
• My neck is long and fair-skinned like my face and it's the right size for my head.
• I have these awesomely broad shoulders that on someone skinnier would look terrible but which lend strength to my body because I don't look fat as much as I do womanly. It's great.
• I have an absolutely average body. Like, it's not an hourglass or anything, but the shape is generally thinner around the waist and broader at the chest and hips. Yay for being totally normal!
• I have hips and thighs, which is going to be so much easier on me for childbearing than it will be for thinner girls. And believe me, I plan to have babies. Like, four of them. But not all at the same time.
• My legs aren't as jiggly as they used to be. I have calf muscle now.
• I have cute little feet. The Beauty's feet are bigger than mine. She often tells me how cute my feet are. I always feel really inordinately pleased by this.

So even when I don't like what I see as a whole, I look at me and I have to admit to myself: "Dang, Abramson. You rock that body. You have your cute little feet and you leave your hair down and you dress like your usual cross between hipster and Amish woman. You work it, because you are a fine-looking woman, and you didn't even have to stick your finger down your throat or take diet pills to get that way."

As you might know, I get depressed sometimes. Not much lately, because I have pills that make me happy and stuff. But sometimes I get depressed and it's not that I think I'm ugly or anything- I just stop caring about what I look like because who cares? Nothing matters, nobody gives a crap, it's just me alone in this world and if I don't care why should anybody else? Nobody's even looking.

And somewhere in my brain a part of me noted, "That attitude is a lot healthier than the one you had of body image when you were in high school, Abramson."

And I considered it, as I recovered- and I decided I wanted to keep that emotion, or lack of it. To not care what anybody else was thinking, and to do things to please myself and not the proletariat.

Is what you look like important? Yeah, if you're dressing to impress others. But then, when they look at you, all they're going to see is you anxious to impress them. Sometimes that's okay. Sometimes it's not.

Of course what you look like is important. But the only person whose opinion you should be really worried about what you look like is your own opinion. Because if you hate the way you look but you look that way to make other people happy, then you need to be a little more assertive about your needs and desires, and others could stand to be a little less aggressive about what you look like, because that is literally the least important part of any relationship.

I'm not saying that I'm never going to think I'm ugly ever again in my whole life. It could yet happen. I have no idea what I'm going to be thinking about five years from now. But for the moment, I have recognized that I am really kind of attractive, and that that makes me happy and that is literally the end of the story.