Day 22 - I don't want to be beautiful.

This poem was written to be performed >>>

I don't want to be beautiful.

At least not in the way you mean when you say that the first time you saw her, she left you utterly speechless. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for every kind of beauty - but if I went blind, I wouldn't need a mirror to know everyday that I am beautiful. I want to be the kind of beauty you have to close your eyes and open your mind to see.

But the problem is, we are a nation of looking without seeing. We instagram, we vine, we tumbler, and we snapchat. We use photographs to represent beauty in everything from the natural to the urban to food to human beings. But when I look at a photograph of you, I'm left blind to everything that makes you who you are.

Maybe that's why I tattooed words on my body. My existence is scrawled across countless pages, etched in symbols that take more than a passing glance to understand. These words on my skin - below my heart - have allowed me to put a piece of who I am where everyone can see it.

I don't want to be beautiful. Not in the way that requires me to smile or cut my hair or have three different surgeries so my mouth is no longer full of metal. If I could, I would go back in time and say, "Thank you, I'll keep the gaps in my teeth."

I don't want to be beautiful in the way that prompts whistles or men's fingers on my ass, or free drinks at the bar.

I have never dyed my hair, which doesn't fall in thick waves to my waist. When I feel stressed, I'll pop zits in the mirror, which only makes me look like a disfigured pizza and stresses me out more. Certain camera angles make my nose look big. I have wrinkles under my eyes from smiling into the sunlight one too many times when I wouldn't put on sunscreen. My second toe is larger than the others. And, yes, my boobs may "look like As" because I particularly dislike wires and padding - that shit is unnatural and uncomfortable, and I think my body looks better in soft, supple lace.

These are the things that you might say make me less beautiful - I say they make me glorious. You can see me, standing here before you, as nothing more and nothing less than precisely what I am.

So keep your selfies and lipstick and magazine ads. I'm not telling you I don't want to be beautiful, I'm telling you, the path we all follow - the one I have traveled down myself - no longer appeals to me.

When I die, I don't want to be remembered as brown eyes or a dress size or six pack abs or even a crazy yoga pose. I don't want to be remembered for something you can see. I want my beauty to be such that, when you close your eyes, I'm still there.

So, you see, when you tell me that there's nothing attractive about bits that jiggle, when you base your desire on the arc of a body in a photograph, when you tell me I'm "naturally" beautiful, I'll tell you you're clueless.

You've seen with your eyes, I'm asking you to see with your heart, your mind, your soul. We aren't all Jack Black in Shallow Hal, but maybe if we were, the whole world would be a more beautiful place.

I don't want to be beautiful. I want to be glorious. For the scars on my messy soul, for the mistakes that I have made, for my trials, and for the ashes I've emerged from. I don't want to be beautiful. I am beautiful. You just have to close your eyes to see it.

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