Beautiful

A while back, there was a gorgeous article in Real Simple magazine. They asked several authors this question: “What makes you feel beautiful?”

The responses themselves are just beautiful. My favorite one comes from Anne Roiphe, who wrote that it’s words from her late husband that makes her feel beautiful. She writes:

”A week before my seemingly healthy 82 year-old husband died, he emerged from his office…and said to me ‘You have made me very happy. You know that you have made me a very happy man.’ There I stood with my white hair and my wrinkles and the face I was born with, although now much creased by time, and I felt beautiful.”

I find that to be an amazing question to ask of yourself, what makes you feel beautiful?

For a while, my sense of beauty was a bit twisted. Growing up, I had a twin sister who I saw as truly beautiful. She was blonde, blue-eyed, had all traits that to me defined beauty.  I wasn’t going to be the “pretty one” and my brilliant older sister had dibs on being the “smart one,” (my alternative learning style had not been fully recognized at this point, but that’s another post.) so I became “the funny one."

This worked well because I was actually very funny. I had been blessed with my father’s sense of humor and built on that gift to spread a bit of merriment each chance I got. I still do.

So I would describe myself as funny yes, but beautiful, not so much. This attitude went on for a while. Until one day in my twenties. My sisters and I got together to have our picture taken as a gift for my father. It was a late summer day, and we all gathered near the ocean for the shot. The picture came out great. There are my beautiful sisters, smiling and looking lovely. But here is me, with my mouth open and my head back in laughter. I remember seeing this picture and thinking, “Wow, I look beautiful.”

Since then, I’ve made peace with my looks. But I always feel I look my most beautiful when I am in the throes of a good laugh. It’s funny (pun intended) that the very thing I had used as a way to compensate for the wrong-headed notion that I wasn’t beautiful is the very thing that helped me find my way to a feeling of utter beauty. In laughter, my eyes crinkle up and my smile beams, there is an energy that lives below my skin and shines like a light. In laughter, I am beautiful.

As Anne Roiphe says in her essay “…I don’t believe that positive thinking improves your skin tone or that loving or being loved changes the shape of your nose or restores the thickness and color of your hair. But I do know that there is a way of being beautiful, even as age takes its toll, that has something to do with the spirit filling with joy…”

What makes you feel beautiful?