Kimberly Steele

When I was 15 years old, I was both fascinated and repulsed whenever I looked at myself in the mirror.  At least in my own case, my first love/hate relationship was with myself.  I felt all alone in my predicament, despite evidence all around me that every teenager was going through something passably similar.  I suffered profound dysmorphia that took a very long time to get over.  To put it unkindly, I was extremely vain.

Misspent Youths

I put a great deal of the blame for my dysmorphia on the trends of the current era, which are designed to terrorize teenagers over the prospect of becoming biological parents during the exact age evolution made them to become biological parents.  The fear campaign worked so well on me that I never became a parent, choosing sterilization at age 33 and finally being able to relax after 21 years of being terrified of becoming pregnant.  Parenthood forces any given human being out of his or her vain stage, thrusting him or her into caring for the new being and ostensibly leaving precious little time for long sojourns in front of a mirror.

Instead of responsible, childless young adults, this culture has created a huge class of eternal children who pout and preen in front of digital mirrors dubbed "social media".  These preeners and pouters often have one or more children staring up at them from the background, wondering why mommy is so obsessed with her phone.  

Vanity Pays

Get enough onlookers or desperate, wanking SIMPs online and you can make a killing.  The old kind of celebrity involved prostrating and degrading oneself on the casting couch.  It was par for the course that you would have to ape a form of affection for a creepy, potentially genitally-disfigured mess of a man or a woman in order to gather a new Academy Award or Grammy.  In short, one way or another, they would get you to sink low enough to sell your soul.  Nowadays, it isn't about sexual favors handed out to the rapaciously greedy and deformed, but more about staying young and pretty forever, as if that were possible.  The debasement du jour is the kind where you submit your face to the clinician's needle and your body to the surgeon's cannula in order to keep influencer cash flowing and sponsorships on the hook.

Is it any wonder that people (especially the young) are dysmorphic, fascinated and repulsed by their own appearances and determined to "improve" the way they look at any price?  

A Supermodel I Ain't

Even when I was at Peak Kim beauty (sounds like a Korean hair salon that specializes in toxic chemical hair straightening and weaves) there were bits of me that were all wrong.   My ugly lower jaw, even after being surgically reduced via sagittal osteotomy at age 17, was and always has been overlarge and crooked.  My left eye is larger than my right eye.  My nose is generous, to use a euphemism.  My knees ripple with fat.  I was a hell of a lot thinner at age 21, and I'm not huge now, but no matter how much weight I lost, I was never thin enough to measure up to the 90s gamine standard, plus I was always too short to be willowy.

No matter how pretty I looked or how much random attention I got by walking down the street, there was always someone better, thinner, prettier, and more well-monied, and it drove me a little bit crazy.  I had limited ability to be happy with my body and face as they were and even less ability to be grateful for their reliability and function.

Nobody's Perfect

Even the most gorgeous of human beings have horrendous flaws, and I'm not just talking about questions of character.  The actress who seems to be on top of the world could look really funny upon taking her shirt off, or perhaps she has a ravaging auto-immune disease such as lupus or diabetes.  The singer who just won another accolade may have been born with a cleft palate and a deviated septum.  Or perhaps whoever it is could have a nasty recessive gene that they are spared yet pass to their kid, which in its way is much worse if you love your kids.  We humans are not gods and we aren't meant to look like Aphrodite and Apollo; at least not for very long.  

Beauty is ephemeral: like the blooming rose, it is a lovely, brief moment that needs to be gracefully let go after it fades and turns into a rosehip. When I see kids going through the same dysmorphia I did on a harder, more intense level, it pains me.  Vanity is not a road that leads to a good place.  Every plastic surgery addict ends up looking eerily homogenous.  The puffy cheeks, the wishbone nose, the eerie smoothness under the eyes, and the duck lips look as if they came from an online catalogue of horrors.  At best, the surgeon's help can result in someone who looks pretty damn good for their age until that inevitable day they hit a brick wall.  The brick wall occurs between the ages of 60-80, when they cease to look good for their age and take on the demeanor of a decrepit impersonator of youth wearing a hideous mask.  

To look genuinely old is much more beautiful.  I don't see "wrinkles" so much as I see the folds in the bark of a magnificent tree trunk.  Wear your past proudly: you have earned those stripes.  I may be alone, but I see your grandeur and I rest underneath your great canopy.  Why any big tree would chop itself down in order to sprout clumsily from its own trunk to appear to be a sapling again I will never understand.