Simply.  Beautiful.  Could I be that?

I’m not asking you.  I could never ask you and then draw much meaning from your responses.  Just now, I’m asking me and I can feel that my answer may be changing.

Beautiful has been a hard word.  I have been told that in a personal way only a couple times in my life and my initial reaction to it has been to cry and shove it away.  It’s a trigger word for me.

Selectively beautiful I can handle – how many times have I been told that I have “such a beautiful face” or eyes or voice. That something I’ve done is beautiful or even that I look beautiful (though that hits a little closer to home).  I can accept those remarks – either because they are targeted enough or because I hear the selectiveness of them.  Or I just let them roll past me and say “thank you” the way a performer learns to say thank you and be gracious.

And now, actually, I feel like my relationship with that word is a little complicated by this huge physical change.  In my outlook on the world and other people, I don’t believe that beauty comes from having the perfect body.  I just don’t.  The people that I describe as beautiful (and it is not a word that I use with abandon) – I do believe are beautiful in both spirit and body, but as I picture them, I see there is a whole range of shapes, sizes, ages, colors, etc…  There is definitely a body component to this word for me, but it’s not body perfect (when applied to others).  And as I struggle with the word for myself, I know that the physical change is not a simple thing….like,  I am smaller and therefore I am closer to beautiful…

Wait.  Stop.  God, do I love to intellectualize the hell out of a concept.

Here’s what happened – I looked at myself a couple times yesterday and I caught a glimpse of beautiful.  And I loved it.  And as I try to write about that – I’m wishing that I could have seen that before I got to this place with my body.  And I worry that others will think that I equate beautiful only to smaller.  Was I beautiful before I lost weight?  Before I had this last surgery?  For myself, I couldn’t see it – wouldn’t let it in.  Undoubtably, and unfortunately, my physical change is a big part of being able to let it in – but I know that this change has come from and through a much deeper process and I think that maybe the physical “is the least of it.”

The glimpse that I got was of “simply beautiful.” Maybe I should just stop there and see if I can take that in.  I say this to my voice students ALL the time.  We work in glimpses.  The first time that something beautiful pops out of you, you may not recognize how to keep it and do it again.  But if you relax and get more glimpses, you might trust it more and figure out how to keep it around.  A glimpse is not something to dismiss!

So, Jennifer, don’t dismiss it.