Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Hey Good Lookin’
In my 100 Essays project, I’ve tried to write about what is front and center in my thinking that day. What is the big thought that has stuck with me? What makes this day different than others? Even when I wander around looking for a topic for the night’s 100 Essays piece, I circle back to what was true today.
What was true today was this: how much I admire women who are beautiful but appear to be unconscious of being beautiful.
I think this is a rare thing. Women who are beautiful were usually beautiful as children. They were told they were beautiful from the moment they could hear and interpret. Their looks were appreciated, made important. So nearly all of the beautiful women I know truly understand and believe they are beautiful. It is something they wear like a fine coat and expensive leather boots, something deserving of comment and appreciation. It is effortless, their beauty, but never unconscious. It is, for many beautiful women, their permanent trump card. I may be as smart as they are but I’m not beautiful.
But then there is the rare woman who is beautiful but unaware. How does this happen, I ask myself. How is someone who is beautiful so casual about her looks? And it occurs to me that such a person considers beauty to be incidental to other more important attributes, like education and intellect, endeavors and accomplishments. Maybe her parents overlooked physical beauty to compliment other facets of her personality and she learned that appearance was subordinate to other, more important things.
Looks were important in our family growing up. If I had to sum it up, I’d say one of my big goals was to be a ‘good looking gal,’ as my dad would say. I also wanted to be a political columnist so winning Miss Teen Michigan wasn’t my primary objective or an objective at all; I just wanted folks to think I was cute. A modest goal. Doable? Sometimes, not always. Endeavoring to be cute required attention and vigilance. I could never be unconscious about my looks; I didn’t have that freedom, the freedom to relax about my looks. How I look is something I am conscious of every minute that I am where other people can see me. It’s oppressive, thinking about it.
So today, I sat at a conference lunch next to an old friend who falls in the beautiful but unaware elite group of women. She is as striking as she was 20 years ago and as unaware and unconcerned. She seems as comfortable in her own skin as anyone I have ever met; and in the moments we talked, I envied her. I envied what I felt to be her sense of freedom from thinking about her looks. It’s not in anything she said or did, it’s just in how she was. So comfortable.
There probably isn’t a man alive who will understand this. But women will.
It’s not an important thing. It’s just a thing that I thought about today. Well, maybe it’s kind of important.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
i understand completely and have had this thought. a woman who is unaware of the power of her natural beauty approaches the world in a completely different way from the one who is told from birth, how lovely she is.