The Compliment

Beauty was skin deep or so I was told. I grew up with the notion that beautiful was not something to be achieved, but something to be perceived. I was aware at all steps of my growing years that I wasn’t beautiful. It didn’t make people love me less, or like me less. In fact I could give a series of adjectives they would easily use to describe me. But I had been aware for as long as I could remember that I didn’t fall in the conventional category of beautiful.

The realization wasn’t always so easy to accept. After all, I wanted just as much attention as the next girl. So I set out to achieve the things that could be achieved, not merely perceived. If I didn’t have the looks, I wanted to hone the things that would garner me attention I desired. I worked hard, I studied, made my share of friends and then left the home to search out what else life had to offer to me. And somewhere along the way, being beautiful, ceased to matter.

Just when I thought I had really left it behind, I was given a glimpse of what I chose to forgo. This summer I held a part time job where I met scores of people. But for the first time in my life polite, shy or kind weren’t the words they used to describe me.

Instead they said I had a beautiful smile. What were smiles worth indeed? Nothing if you asked me. But they told me it was gift I could freely bestow or withhold and my beauty was in the fact that I chose to share it and brighten a moment of someone’s day. They said I had pretty hair. So what, I wondered out to myself. Hair, they said, took a long time to grow and the time I took to grow mine out showed how I nurtured things that mattered to me. They said the clothes I wore were gorgeous. Most of my clothes were from back home and they were faded. But they said it didn’t matter because when they looked at how I dressed they saw not only me but where I came from. And it was beautiful of me to represent my homeland. When they heard me speak, they said I had a vibrant voice and they thought that the effort I took to speak their language was what made me beautiful.

I was non pulsed. How did they change the context of the word and apply it so strongly to me? The girl in the mirror was no exotic beauty. Yes I could dress up pretty, but that didn’t make me one, did it?

Then I realized what was wrong with my definition of beautiful. It could never be just skin deep or about appearances. It’s what I chose to show off  to the world outside that reflected the measure of beauty. Wit, grace, and manners were all some form of beauty. It was something to be felt, not just seen. May be the reflection would never be the ideal of it, but that didn’t mean a person couldn’t be beautiful.

This summer I didn’t receive just compliments, shallow and soon to be forgotten. I received a lesson. I learned to feel beautiful.

And let me say this, the world’s a very different place from the perspective of someone who is confident in the beauty they possess.