Becoming Beautiful

7 minute read time

Coming up in Ireland in the 1980’s ‘beautiful’ was not a word that was used self-reflexively. At least not by anyone I knew. Other people were beautiful, people on telly, in films, maybe even people we knew. But we ourselves? Nah. That just didn’t apply. Thinking of yourself as beautiful would have been having notions. And having notions in Ireland in the 1980s (and ’90s and beyond?) was not the done thing.

Of course, all that changed with the Celtic Tiger when Irish people started taking multiple yearly sun holidays and travelling to the Continent for mini-breaks; getting regular mani-pedis and having drinks in the bars of boutique hotels. Oh yes, we were starting to arrive. And just as the wave was cresting, I departed to embark on a new life as a graduate student in Chicago.

I certainly never thought I was beautiful before I lived in the States. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t recall Irish people talking about beauty much in the ’80s. Or love for that matter. Did we tell each other we loved each other? I mean, my Mam. Maybe boyfriends. But outside that? Not really. Not that I remember. Love and beauty just weren’t things we spoke openly about it. Or maybe we just didn’t think that we deserved things like love and beauty.

When I was twenty-three my then-boyfriend had flowers delivered to my workplace on Valentine’s Day, a dozen roses, pink and red. He said the pink represented my beauty, red his love for me. Of course, I was thrilled, if not a little perplexed. Me, beautiful? I didn’t think so. I mean I knew that I was attractive and could look in the mirror sometimes and say, ‘yeah I look good’. But I didn’t think I was beautiful, that designation seemed reserved for others. For people who had something special inside. Or maybe they were more wholesome or less broken somehow.

Since I was a teenager I’d never had any shortage of interest from fellas and I definitely knew how to dress up and look the part for a night out. It’s not that I thought I was ugly, not at all, I was hot stuff. But beauty didn’t really come into the equation. My Dad used to admonish my sister and I for ‘gilding the lily’ – putting on too much makeup when we were teenagers and didn’t need it. Of course, now I understand exactly why he said that. When you’re young, you’re gorgeous just because you’re young and all that makeup just hides the natural beauty. But when my dad was saying that to us I still didn’t actually think I was beautiful. That took a long time.

I met my husband when I was thirty years old whilst I was living in Chicago working towards a PhD in philosophy and he was a touring musician based in Los Angeles. A couple of years later I had left graduate school and committed to full-time yoga teaching and he had moved to Chicago to live with me. Being serious about teaching yoga meant getting a website up, a prospect I found somewhat daunting not least because of the requisite professional photographs. Me, get photographed by a pro? Eh, not sure about that. Dave insisted on it and he really did know much more about those things than I so I capitulated.

Now here’s the thing, from the moment we became romantically involved Dave told me I was beautiful and would not hear of my rebuttals. This was confrontational for an Irish girl like me. Particularly one born in 1973. I can’t say that I was an instant convert to the idea but over time how I see myself has shifted and that has everything to do with my yoga practice, with learning to love and accept myself.

But back to the professional shoot. A friend connected me to her photographer friend and he told me not to even bother doing the shoot if I was not going to schedule professional hair and makeup. Dave came with me to the shoot and to my astonishment, I actually quite enjoyed myself. But the real surprise came when I saw the photos. I was shocked and pleasantly surprised at how good I looked, dare I say it, how beautiful. I couldn’t deny that the photos were of a beautiful woman with a lovely body and that woman was (is) me. This was huge, a breakthrough, but it wasn’t a one-shot deal.

I have dealt with body dysmorphia for most of my adult life. In my very early twenties, I went through a very dark period and developed a disordered relationship with food.

Looking back I was probably not far off a total breakdown and experiencing extreme self-loathing and shame. I gained a lot of weight and that added to my tendency to beat myself up emotionally. I could not understand how people could like me, my self-hatred was that bad. I once even actually thanked a friend for staying friends with me through my darkest days.

When I think about that now I have a lot of love and compassion for my former self. I generally have positive self-regard and I’m much kinder to myself now but crawling out of a hole of such a negative self-image is a long, slow process. You don’t exactly bounce around saying ‘I’m beautiful, I’m beautiful.’ Well, now I can do that. On good days. It has taken twenty-five years to get here.

To see myself as beautiful in an ongoing way, and not just for an instant in a photograph with professional hair and makeup, I had to learn to really love myself. I had to learn to forgive myself for mistakes and shortcomings. To excavate deep inside and encounter past hurts, fears and disappointments. But maybe even more challenging, I had to learn to see the positive. To recognise that I’m a good person. I’m kind and generous and sensitive. I have finely tuned intuition and am an attentive listener. I have a great sense of humour and am compassionate and mostly good-humoured. People like me.

Of course, I’m not perfect and that’s the whole point. When we insist on perfection as a standard for being lovable, we deprive ourselves of so much. I don’t have to be perfect to be loved and neither do you. I get to make mistakes, to have off days, to come up short sometimes.

I used to stand in front of the mirror and search for flaws in my appearance, things that I could latch onto to feel bad about myself. I can’t say that I never do that anymore (I’m constantly looking at my forty-eight-year-old thighs to see if they look fat – I know, brutal) but I do it way less. I used to dread looking at photographs in case I looked heavy, now I know that at first, I might automatically think I look heavy but after a while when I look at the photo again, I’ll see more accurately what’s there.

To be clear, I’m on the low end of ideal weight for my height, but my history of self-loathing, body dysmorphia and shame means that I’m a little crazy when it comes to my body. Now, though, I know that I’m crazy and I can actually say to myself: Dearbhla, this is your crazy and you’re not going to empower that voice anymore.

To be clear I’m not equating beauty and thinness. Women of all sizes are absolutely gorgeous. It’s just that for me, weight is directly correlated with self-esteem and love. The wound is so deep and the history so dark that even now I can’t go there. It’s simply not safe for me psychically. I know that this is poignant, that my value as a person is not a function of a number on the scales (I don’t actually weigh myself) or what size jeans I’m wearing.

But I also know that to see myself as beautiful on the outside I need to feel beautiful on the inside. And at the time in my life when I felt worst inside, I was much bigger than I am now. By today’s body positivity standards I wasn’t even that big, probably 15 pounds overweight. When I started to lose weight, I started to feel better about myself and regain my confidence and self-worth, not because I thought that people would like me more, but because I shifted my inner state and started to feel that I was taking control of my happiness.

I know that for some people my resolution is not sufficient, they would say that you can be beautiful at any weight and size. Yes, that is true. And it has taken me a long, long, time to get to where I am today. It’s a place I value. I’m okay with the incongruence and I’m not asking anyone else to follow suite. Sometimes life is messy and imperfect solutions are the best that we have.

The truth is that I’m still terrified of putting on weight because I equate it with being so unhappy and full of self-loathing. When I go to that place of remembered shame, and the memory is somatic, it lives in my body, I feel so bad about myself that I crumble. It’s dark and not somewhere I want to be.

This rarely happens these days. I’ve come so far and feel steady in myself. I know that I’m loved. I know that I’m a good person. I trust myself and I trust the process I’ve gone through. I know that yoga helps, as does meditation and yoga nidra. Running too. Quiet time, relaxing and just being. Laughter. Dancing, getting lost in music. Kissing and hugging and making love. Being around children and nature and things of beauty that uplift the soul.

This journey of becoming beautiful is really a journey inside. The outside is simply a reflection of something deeper. Sure, nice lipstick helps, a good haircut. But when I was feeling bad about myself and unworthy of love, those things didn’t help at all. The kindness of a friend did, or a therapist, sunshine on my skin. The balm of yoga and coming home to myself and feeling good in my body, realising that I was liked and accepted by people, warts and all.

I’m glad that now, in my late forties, I can own my beauty (most of the time). I see it when I smile when I feel relaxed and happy. It has nothing to do with being cool, or hot, wearing the right clothes. You know, all the stuff that seemed important in my twenties. It’s a deeper thing, it’s called loving yourself.

Dearbhla Kelly, April 2021