what makes you feel beautiful?
and what does beautiful mean?
Around the 13:50 mark of this interview, Victoria Pedretti is asked when she feels the most beautiful. She ponders the question and eventually says, in a shaking voice, maybe when I’m dancing. I’ve seen this clip dozens of times, but something about it always stops me in my tracks. It makes me consider what makes me feel beautiful and what that word even means in modern culture.
Pedretti’s response suggests an ancient sort of beauty derived from joy, pleasure, and freedom. When I think of beauty, I don’t immediately think of joy. I think of desperation and the messy confrontation between my own values and what’s been presented to me as beautiful.
There’s a stark difference between being seen as beautiful and feeling it. I can be seen as beautiful when I do my makeup to cover my acne or when I wear flattering clothes. I can be seen as beautiful even when doubt and panic ripple through my chest like a high tide. That doesn’t mean I feel beautiful. In my experience, the two don’t often coincide.
I feel the most beautiful when I forget how I look. Remembering my body is like remembering I’m on a stage for an invisible audience, and I need to appear a certain way for them to applaud. The applause makes me feel good in the moment, but when it ends I’m left wondering who I am without it. When I forget the audience is there, when the stage lights of life blind me, I’m beautiful and timeless.
I laugh in my best friend’s car, and I don’t care about the gap between my two front teeth or what I sound like. I lie in bed while morning sunbeams come in through the window, and I don’t care about my thighs. The beauty in these moments comes from the soft underbelly of truth. It’s tender and fleeting, but it’s there.
It’s ironic because I usually find beauty everywhere I look. I’m a sentimental and optimistic person with rose-colored glasses always tucked in my pocket. I try not to shy away from anything, so why do I avoid looking in the mirror?
The concept of beauty is a collection of contradictions for me. Sometimes I wish I could just accept my body with neutrality and not worry about it, but I can’t deny that fashion and makeup genuinely do make me feel beautiful at times. Is that illusory—just a product of pandering to the invisible audience? I don’t know.
I do know that I spend too much time thinking about how I look, and chances are you do too. How could we not? It’s embedded in our culture for better or, more often, for worse. Rejecting those ideals can be a rebellion in itself. A celebration. So, I encourage you to do just that. Do something that makes you feel beautiful. Sing in your backyard. Write. Create. Laugh. Hug. Kiss. It won’t be easy. My relationship with my appearance is a constant Sisyphus-like battle. Yet, one day our bodies will end up like every other body that’s ever lived—cold and still. Until then, I think it’s our responsibility to live in our bodies how we want. Make your soul feel beautiful, because it is. You are.
this is jumbled and i wrote it very quickly, but it was something i needed to get out of my system. i don’t think i’ll ever be able to write a cohesive essay on what beauty means to me, because it’s constantly changing. i hope this finds you well, and i hope my words, although probably overly sentimental, resonate with you on some level. if they did, please consider sharing, commenting, or subscribing to support my future work. thank you so much for reading and being here.
until next time,
grace
“There’s a stark difference between being seen as beautiful and feeling it.” This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: there have often been times when I’ve looked at a picture of myself and been disappointed or underwhelmed, but then if I think back to the actual moment, I felt beautiful in that outfit or doing whatever I was doing! Social media puts so much emphasis on optics, but at the end of the day I think it’s out internal experiences that really matter!
“When I forget the audience is there, when the stage lights of life blind me, I’m beautiful and timeless.” Oh my god? I just subscribed to your substack because how could I not after reading you? Your words are beautiful! <3