I spent a lot of time staring at my own reflection in 2020. Zoom was one reason, of course: I’m embarrassed to admit that even today, my eyes tend to drift toward my own pixelated thumbnail. Yet another was that I had just started immersing myself more seriously in the art of drag. Before the pandemic, it had been nearly impossible to find enough time or solitude for the three-odd hours I needed to paint. After the invisible hand of Covid swiftly removed ninety-nine percent of my college’s campus overnight, a new rhythm emerged: on Friday nights, I would watch the new episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race: Season 12, which reliably motivated me to spend the following hours between 9 PM to 1 AM by putting myself into drag, taking a few photos for posterity, and de-dragging.
I was truly awful at the beginning. Like any self-respecting baby queen, I nevertheless persisted in reveling in the delusion that I was beautiful. I gleefully sent pictures of my early attempts to friends, who kindly praised me more than my transformations perhaps merited. There were plenty of completely innocuous reasons for that euphoria: artistic and creative fulfillment, participating in a queer tradition with a rich history, finally putting all those hours spent watching makeup tutorials on YouTube to good use. What was most compelling, though, was the sensation of what RuPaul often refers to as “the power available to you in drag.” I was intoxicated by the newfound sense of control over how I was altering my physical appearance so as to become a stranger to myself. With enough cosmetic tricks, the physical transformation was so stark that it demanded a new name and pronouns, and thus, a new persona. A fresh start.
That joy inverted my usual distaste for being judged in any way based on my physical appearance. I hate being perceived. Obsessing publicly over one’s beauty (or lack thereof) is either vain or incel-esque, so instead I privately harbored a cliché resentment towards societal beauty standards, letting it fester into everyday acts of cynical refusal. Wary of letting these poisonous and socially toxic ideals affect my behavior in any way, I religiously avoided dieting and the gym. With a good deal of grumpiness, I had nonetheless accepted that I was unattractive as per Tressie McMillan Cottom’s definition in Thick: “when I say that I am unattractive or ugly, I am not internalizing the dominant culture’s assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me. And signaling who did it.” Through drag, I found that I could for once access the feeling of being beautiful — or at the very least, becoming an object of attention, whereas before my chubby Asian body had been invisible at best.
Curiously, my foray into drag coincided with the start of a years-long daily habit of running. Perhaps the sense of control I felt in drag catalyzed my efforts to optimize my boy appearance. During those quiet hours running miles around my university’s empty campus, I could convince myself that my motivations were pure: no one was around to see me, so all of my efforts must have been intrinsically motivated. Drag, too, was seemingly mine and mine alone, putting aside the 2 AM image dumps to my friends and a fledgling Instagram account. Of course, my logic was flawed precisely because my gaze has never been mine to begin with, even if it feels that way. What I judge to be beautiful is a consequence of decades of socialization. Even beyond that, I as an individual tend to inhabit the perspective of others before my own; sometimes it’s noble, often it’s just neurosis. It happens even when no one is there, like the way you replay childhood dynamics throughout adulthood, no matter how physically distant your family is.
Nonetheless, I thought solitude had freed me. I ran five miles a day. I lost weight. I looked better in drag, too, with cheekbones that were visible even without contour. I purchased a new, smaller wardrobe online. Out of drag, I was pleased that the face in the mirror was becoming unfamiliar. As the pandemic waned and I had less time, I stopped painting myself as often. I kept running. I took more selfies, and for the first time, liked the way I looked in them. Occasionally, I fell off my exercise and eating routines; every time, I hated myself for it. I injured my legs running, and then my arms while lifting. I struggled to forgive myself for falling off the path of relentless self-improvement.
Over time, the ostensibly pure motivations for exercise became more transparently about becoming attractive. I justified this compulsiveness about looking fit as something that I was pressured or compelled to do by the beauty standards of the gay community. (That pressure is real, of course. But pressure is not always tantamount to coercion, and any adult with a sense of self is capable of resisting such social pressure.) When I became aware that this compulsiveness, which supposedly was about improving my health, was eroding my mental health and possibly leading to physical injuries, I tried to formulate a healthier relationship with food and exercise. Today, I am still trying.
I still spend more time looking at my reflection than I’d care to admit. New habits die hard, I suppose. Jia Tolentino in Trick Mirror quoting sociologist Heather Widdows: “That the beauty ideal is pleasurable and demanding, and often concurrently, is a key feature.” It feels good to look good, especially when you can feel smug about the hard work it took to moderate your diet and exercise consistently. (Awareness of the privileged circumstances which enable such choices fades into an ethical aside.) Part of the trickiness of beauty standards is that, of course, you never quite measure up. Even my friends whom I consider objectively gorgeous have privately disclosed worries that they themselves are unattractive. In the marketplace of desire, earning more can’t always make you happier.
What makes the struggle to attain physical beauty so irresistibly tantalizing, despite all of our hemming and hawing about how problematic beauty standards are, is that it’s still the most tractable problem in the universe of “Ways I Can Feel Better About Myself.” It’s easy to imagine yourself eating a salad or going to the gym thirty days in a row. It’s much harder to do other things that might improve one’s quality of life, like becoming less judgmental or reducing one’s attachment to work. Beauty standards may be impossible, but at least they’re obvious. The internal work is much less straightforward. The scale won’t lie to me, but in the name of protecting my self-destructive personality traits, I’m capable of post-hoc rationalizing, justifying, narrativizing. When it comes to the Self ™️, I have to see it to believe it.
But upon reflection (hah!), what I see in the mirror isn’t exactly what other people see, after all. When we examine ourselves, we’re usually fixated on discerning our flaws; think of all of the times you’ve checked a zit in the mirror or discreetly glanced at a car window. In these moments, we are at our most judgmental and self-critical. A date once snapped a picture of me as I was looking off into the distance. He showed the picture to me later. “I took the photo because I thought you looked really cute,” he said. Seeing my side profile in the photo, I recoiled. “God, I hate how flat my face is,” I said. “My profile looks so weird.” I remember feeling somewhat violated upon seeing the photo, as if this man had crossed a sacred boundary by taking a picture of me without my knowledge. In hindsight, I feel ashamed that I was so protective of my own perceived ugliness, the defensive manifestation of what I thought was self-awareness. I regret brushing aside his compliment as if it was worthless.
In the past, I’ve been similarly dismissive of compliments from friends. They’re just being nice, after all, and I’m only friends with nice people. Friends, however, witness us in a far more diverse range of poses, circumstances, and moods than we get to see ourselves. I see myself scowling in a mirror; they see me doubling over in laughter, animated in lively conversation, deep in thought. At least to me, my friends seem at the height of their beauty in precisely the moments when they are the least self-conscious. Perhaps this quality of friendship makes our friends less, not more, biased assessors of beauty.
I hope we all learn to judge our beauty from more than what we see of ourselves in our most self-conscious moments: poses for group pictures, fleeting glances at reflective surfaces, touch-ups in the bathroom mirror. Nor is the solution to imagine myself from the perspective of a stranger, who has no emotional attachment to me and thus evaluates me purely by my appearance. I think instead the preferred default is to think of yourself as you would a friend, one whose appearance — no matter how disheveled — never fails to lift your mood. It seems silly, even patronizing, to trust my friends in all matters of the heart and then forever suspect that they must be crazy, or statistically unrepresentative, when they tell me I am attractive. In fact, they may be right, in the only definition of the word “attractive” that matters in the fullness of time.
Grazie Sophia Christie writes in The Point that “[t]he symbol of being a plain girl is a heart trying hard. Erasing, scribbling. Romanticizing her contours. Narrativizing her lack.” Today, I objectively meet more of society’s beauty standards, but I still have that tendency to narrativize what — and who — I lack. To be judged ugly is to have been wronged in some way by society, and to be an object of sympathy, even if that sympathy is ultimately self-dealing. It feels a little easier to let go of my self-obsession when I think about how exhausting it must be for my friends to watch me carry it, this anxiety about my looks that does no one any good.
Every now and then I’m able to romanticize what I have instead of what I lack. I have loving relationships with friends and (most of) my family; I lack a boyfriend. They’re not mutually exclusive, of course, but something tells me that if I could only have one or the other, I know what I would choose; in fact, it’s the choice I’ve already made in so many little ways, over and over and over. I admire my friends, and I know they admire me back. All that is needed is for me to admit to myself that this is a beauty worth having, too.
Thank you for reading this meandering essay on beauty, a subject for which there already exists so much good writing that you could’ve read instead. Fun fact: this is the first essay I’ve written in a while (you could end the sentence there) that hasn’t relied on some emotional extrema. I’m trying to write more, to write better, and to write through not only the ups and downs, but through mundanity as well. Let me know what you think — I’d be delighted to hear from you.