On Beauty and Claustrophobia

 In hindsight, I realize that beauty was prone to floating over my head, far away into a vast expanse, like a kite being carried away by the wind to a place it does not know. Other times, beauty was like water--not something I could cup in my hands without some of it seeping through the cracks in my fingers, possibly due to my limited understanding of it.

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From an early age, we are taught to pay close attention to our hair. Long hours spent sitting under expert fingers and falling asleep to old Nollywood tapes come to mind. Followed by tension headaches. Sometimes my hair was  plaited into straight back cornrows, other times, short box braids, or a simple bun. I remember bouncing from one hairdresser to the next, all of them complaining about how thick my hair was, even with relaxers. Then one day, I got a haircut and my long tresses were gone. Many years later, when my hair grew back, I would struggle to tie it in uneven pigtails and tame it with baubles, before I discovered flexi rod rollers and flat irons as a young adult.

  At age eight, the cosmetic fairies decided that my eyebrows would never reach their optimum fleekness. It all started with a T.V show. The theme song to the cartoon Shaolin Showdown was blaring from the screen. My brother, unable to resist the upbeat tune, flailed his arms and legs around, and next thing I knew, I was crash landing into the bottom of the couch, my face colliding with the wooden base. A pink sliver of skin solidified  over the wound after the bleeding stopped and until this day, remains nestled in the underbrush of eyebrow hair. 

My relationship with beauty in elementary school was far from perfect. I tried wearing opaque black tights under navy blue skirts-- a huge step for someone who only wore pants. Then I upgraded my wardrobe in middle school which now featured printed tees and bleached skinny jeans on no-uniform days.

I can't forget the period I had scoliosis. Not only was my spine curved, but to make things worse, I had to traverse the halls of my school with a sweaty, latex-smelling cheetah print brace strapped to my back. I wore loose clothing to accommodate this extra plastic layer of skin protruding under my shirt.  

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Fast forward to my sophomore year of high school. In my experimentation with an afro, I also discovered make up. Two years later, I discovered weave. Slowly, I crafted my own simple make up routine, which wasn't actually fine-tuned until I turned 20. In addition to these cosmetic breakthroughs, I also found a few truths about the issue of beauty as a whole, which I am still learning. 

                                               

Somewhere along the line, I realized that  beauty is claustrophobic. Beauty is fluid. No matter how much society tries to build boxes and walls around it, it only manages to seep out. The truth remains that there isn't just one way to be beautiful. There is beauty in a kind spirit. There is beauty in resilience--in the ability to survive tragedy and hardship, and to own one's scars and shortcomings and mistakes. Beauty has skin the color of oak trees and vanilla skies, and often adopts a strange, unidentifiable hue somewhere in between. Beauty is flawed and sometimes jagged.  Beauty has random freckles and even the absence of color. Beauty is the birthmark of creation--of humanity--an extension of the creator. 

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

-David the Psalmist

Psalm 139:14