What to do when you're feeling ugly
The Brutally Honest Reason you feel this way and Real Advice on what to do about it
Beauty is powerful. It opens doors, it gets people to like you, to help you, to want to be your friend or your lover. Yet, for all its utility, we desire to be beautiful not for any purpose, but for the mere loveliness of it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look in the mirror and to be delighted by what you see? To be able to imagine yourself the worthy heroine of an epic hero?
We can create body positivity and self acceptance movements as much as we like, but the truth comes back when we see ourselves in a picture someone else took when we were not aware, or we catch a glimpse in the mirror, and often, many of us, are a bit disappointed. These feelings are even more pronounced today than they once might have been because we see an unnatural number of beautiful people in our daily visual lives through social media and instagram.
For a woman, seeing another beautiful woman is a double experience: there is a painful pang of admiration and longing as we both adore her unquestionable beauty and at once wish that God had painted us with the same brush. The modern Vanity Industrial Complex feeds off of this natural feeling to sell us various cosmetic enhancements: filler, botox, plastic surgery etc. While I do not believe that cosmetic enhancement is inherently evil, it is true that Vanity becomes monstrous when it becomes an obsession. At no time are we more vulnerable to this obsessive disposition than when we feel ugly.
