A Note On the Desire to Be Physically Attractive...

Some of us spend years of our youth desiring more than anything else to be physically attractive, good looking, beautiful, or sexy. It can be a terrible thing to desire beauty, perhaps even worse than desiring to be rich or famous or powerful. Just ask all the young girls that have suffered through years of eating disorders or the women that have had one plastic surgery after another, trying to buy the feeling of being desirable often without success.

And the ones that do at last find a picture in the mirror that they can be content with, often find that the "beauty" they finally attained is useless. Yet so many of us are greedy for it anyway, just as people are often greedy for money and fame. And all of these so often prove so useless to getting us to a place where we can be happy. And just as useless perhaps is the need to be loved and noticed or maybe it's kind of the same thing.

So when do shallow ambitions begin to swallow us up? Don't we always sort of know better even from the beginning? There are many factors I suppose, but for so many I believe that it begins with a comparison. Someone we want to be like, to be better than, or at least be on the same playing field with. We are tired of other people always getting what we wanted.

We get caught up in an illusion, the illusion that we can worship superficial beauty without losing ourselves, or worse, we deny that we are worshiping it at all. We cling to the dreams that we think we can control and continue climbing ladders on all the wrong walls.

But eventually, if we are lucky, the illusion fades. We find ourself again. We realize it's not the reflection in the mirror that matters. We get over ourselves. We understand the foolishness of self-obsession. We look up at the clouds and laugh. We start to enjoy sunrises again. And regardless of how many people 'desire' us, we no longer feel alone.