“Vanity Thy Name is (Me) & What is Beauty”

On the one hand I am ashamed to admit and on the hand I don’t think I should be ashamed to admit that I have some vanity.  I have chased “Beauty” or what I thought was beauty almost all my life.  This chasing has not been an easy path. In fact the concept of beauty has been a love hate thing for me.  You might be thinking what a jerk; thinking that I should just get over myself.  Well that’s pretty much what I have been telling myself most of my life.  But if you will be honest with yourself for a minute, you can just think about your own ideas and thoughts about your own state of beauty.  I think that if you are honest you will acknowledge that everyone, including yourself, is concerned about how you look.  It is natural.  That is why women and men put great amount of effort in choosing clothes, getting a good haircut or finding products so that our skin is as good as it can get.  If not the pursuit of beauty why then is the cosmetic industry a multi-billion dollar industry?  So let’s all be honest, we all aspire to be the best version of ourselves in many respects including beauty. 

Starting from a very young age I have had a tremendous battle with how I looked.  In addition to the normal craziness that young girls go through I had the added issues with being of mixed race.  I am half Chinese and half African American.  Through no fault of my own but rather through genetics inherited from my parents I have a very exotic look. For most of my early life I just wanted to look normal because looking strange is not a good thing when trying to fit in with your classmates at school.  The last thing I wanted to do was to stand out. I was teased a lot, really a lot and sometimes in pretty vicious ways.  I learned to survive by either fighting back or by trying to make myself invisible.  As a teenager I purposely made myself look unattractive by wearing horn rimmed glasses and two ponytails on the side of my head until I was almost 18 years old.  But there was one thing that I could not disguise and that was my body.  Since the age of 13 I had a really hot body, not skinny and not fat but just right.  So no matter what kind of frumpy clothes or stupid hairstyle or lack of make-up I always had the knowledge that my body was “smokin”.  This was like my secret weapon.  As a young woman I finally came to terms with the way that I looked.  I started to appreciate my uniqueness and no longer wished to just blend into the crowd.  I don’t believe that I was vain; I was simply grateful for what I had.  I realized that my brand or version of beauty is just that, mine.  I never sought after looking like someone else and I was never jealous of someone else’s beauty.  That was their brand.  You might ask yourself what have this got to do health and fitness because this is supposed to be a blog about that topic. 

Well you know the story if you have read my previous post; along the way later in my life I lost the one thing that I thought I would always have, my smokin body.  I knew that I would one day get older and that my face was not going to be the same.  I was not prepared for how my body would fail me.  So in that pursuit of fitness and health as I embraced CrossFit and the Paleo diet, initially it was to gain back my ideal body again.  I wanted to be “slim” again.  Slim was my idea of beauty.  All I could think about was what clothes I would be able to wear once I got slim.  You know the kind of clothes that only very thin models can wear.  But something happened in the last few months. 

I had a change in perception of what is beautiful.  As my body started to change, not only get smaller but to get more muscular I realized how beautiful a deltoid can be.  Sometimes when I inadvertently catch a glimpse of my arms or my legs and see a slight shadow of bicep or quadriceps I get a tingle of excitement.  I sometimes can’t hold in my amazement and have to giggle to myself.  Gaining this new appreciation for this different version or brand of beauty has made me not necessarily jealous of others but somewhat envious of others that are much more endowed with this beauty.  At the CrossFit gym I am overwhelmed on a regular basis at the beauty that I see around me.  Men and women with such perfect bodies and radiating with health and vitality.  I want that! What I want now is so much more than what I had when I was a younger.  What I had before is not good enough anymore; my current ideal of what is beautiful no longer fit into that paradigm.  So yes “Vanity, thy name is Della” but it is a vanity born of the pursuit of true beauty that can only come from being fit.