I am less invested in beauty than ever.

Ironically, I also feel more beautiful than ever.

Me at 10. Photo credit: my sweet Momzer.

I was what you might call an ugly duckling, or more charitably, a late bloomer. As a kid, I was chubby, bookish, and hopeless at reading social cues. I have a big nose and the kind of ambiguous biracial features that make people ask, “So…what are you?” I needed glasses that made one of my eyes look roughly twice the size of the other, and for some reason, my mom kept getting me these weird tight perms—starting in kindergarten—which made me look like a tiny lunch lady wearing an invisible hairnet. I longed for attention and validation, but I knew from a very young age that not being thin or pretty meant I had to compensate with my personality, smarts and talent.

So that’s what I did. I learned how to be funny. I drew people’s attention to my sharp mind and singing voice. I signed up to perform in every concert, play, or musical I could find. I was the first to raise my hand every time a teacher asked a question in class. I was always eager to read aloud from textbooks, because while the other kids struggled to sound out words, I could cold read like a pro from about third grade on.

I thought all these things would make me friends. I was wrong. I was bullied incessantly every year of my life until my junior year of high school, and it only stopped then because I caved and joined the Christian clique. Those kids had to be nice to me because Jesus.

In my twenties, I shed my Hermione Granger-esque know-it-all vibe and learned the art of charm. I did this by watching and emulating charming people, predominantly my former best friend, an artfully duplicitous charmer with a knack for making people think they were her favorite person when in reality she found them insufferable. Turned out charm was pretty simple: Ask a lot of questions, give a lot of compliments, and only offer information about me when asked, making sure to leave them wanting more. Boom! Instant charm. Fascinate the masses by making them feel fascinating.

Then, in my late twenties, with all this good personality stuff in place, I discovered for the first time that being beautiful was actually attainable for me. It turns out that conventional beauty isn’t a natural gift from God at all, but rather, a) a skill set, b) a series of purchases, and c) a commitment to lowering your enjoyment of life in order to increase your physical perfection.

I could learn skills. I could even make purchases in spite of being a stereotypically broke artist, thanks to credit cards, the normalization of crushing debt, and the idea that spending money on beauty was an “investment” in my marketability as a performer.

And that third thing? After years of feeling worthless because I didn’t meet conventional beauty standards, enjoyment of life was something I was happy to trade in exchange for all that juicy external validation.

I learned how to be beautiful. I started paying for expensive skincare, makeup, and hair care products, as well as fancy haircuts, brow waxes, and manicures. I practiced my makeup techniques until I could do them in my sleep. I learned to shape my eyebrows and wing my eyeliner. I counted calories, weighed my portions—even at restaurants, which is so achingly awkward—and worked out at odd hours in a never ending battle to burn off all the food I’d eaten and then some. In six months, I got skinny and made my hair and face prettier than they’d ever been. I bought a wardrobe of new, smaller, more feminine clothes.

I was hot. For the first ever. And the world rewarded me with a universally approving gaze (and the occasional envious stare, which was just as ego-fluffing as the approval).

Because of all the years of Ugly Duckling-ing my way through life, I was also funny, smart, and talented. I was now The Whole Package, pinecones. Watch me whip my hair sexily while belting a Really High Note and then cracking a punchline. Ten out of TEN. My glow-up was on POINT.

BOW DOWN BITCHES THIS HOTNESS IS ME. Photo by Manuela Rana.

Suddenly, aspirationally attractive people were attracted…to me. I’m talking models and leading men types. For the first time ever in my musical theatre career, I was getting cast in leading roles. I was playing characters that got to fall in love.

(Did you know that, Hairspray aside, fat people are almost never allowed to be in love in musical theatre? How fucked is that?! The message that comes through to fat people loud and clear is: You are not worthy of love if you don’t change your body.)

All this adoration and elevation changed me, mostly for the worse. I became obsessed with looks. I had a best friend who grew noticeably less warm toward me every time I was thinner than her, and I didn’t even notice because I was so wrapped up in the warm glow of smug self-obsession. I no longer judged potential sexual partners based on their character, but on their abs.

I became shallow.

Photo by Manuela Rana’s assistant? Maybe? Or whoever the lovely young man was who did my hair and makeup for this shoot? It was so long ago, gah, I’m sorry, mysterious photo taker!

The irony is that all this beautifying actually didn’t help my career at all, other than that I started getting cast in lead roles in staged readings of musicals that paid close to nothing. My physical transformation actually cut me off from my closest brush with Broadway. Before all this went down, I had made it final callbacks for the Broadway company of Mamma Mia! They liked me for one of Sophie’s two best friends, and nearly placed me on the national tour before deciding instead to move the understudy into the role instead. But when that happened, they told me I was on the future hire list and that it was only a matter of time before I was placed in one of the many standing or touring productions.

Two years later, that still hadn’t happened, and the casting office called me in for another round of final callbacks. Great! I thought. I’m skinny and hot now and even more likely to wow them! I’m totally booking this!

They released me into the wild streets of New York City before the dance call and I never heard from them again.

They wanted me when I was a quirky, chubby, queer-coded gender goblin. They didn’t want my painstakingly crafted, glamorous, hot, feminine facade.

I’m now in my FUCK PRETTY era. Leaning into the quirk. Photo by me.

I used to really care about being “beautiful,” and by “beautiful,” I mean whatever the current beauty standards, those capricious and ever-changing bullshit ideals, might be. As the compulsion recedes, I can finally see it for what it is: an addiction to external validation, approval, and an easy ticket to feeling like you belong in the world. When you are conventionally beautiful, people treat you with more grace and kindness. People assume good things about you.

When you aren’t conventionally beautiful, you have to work harder to be seen positively. To be seen at all.

This does not align with my values, which state clearly that human beings are inherently valuable and worthy of curiosity, compassion, dignity, and kindness. In spite of these values, which I hold dear, my sight is still at least partially filtered through the lens of conventional beauty standards. My eyes—and probably yours, too—have been scarred by countless celebrations of waifishly thin women, wafer-like women, tiny, liftable, breakable women who spend their middle age desperately clinging to the illusion of youthful perfection, and now it’s hard to see normal, healthy, female bodies without thinking they need to lose a few pounds. We’ve been left with a kind of blindness, a kind of delusional selective sight.

It’s a wondrous thing when you begin to peel those scales from your eyes. You start to see the waifs for what they are—talented, fierce women who have been tragically convinced the only way to keep money and love flowing toward them is to starve themselves. You don’t get Demi-Moore-at-the-2025-Oscars thin using moderation. (And if you’re thinking, oh, she’s probably just on Ozempic! Understand this: Ozempic in doses that deliver maximum results allow the patient to stoically withstand starvation.) You start to see how insane these beauty standards actually are—bony bodies aren’t something we should be striving for. They are evidence of illness.

I am less invested in beauty than ever, and yet I feel more beautiful than I ever have. I am the same weight I was before I lost all those pounds in my late twenties, but I’m fitter and stronger and worlds more confident, thanks to a focus on building my strength and endurance, rather than shrinking my body to fit into subzero sizes. I eat for health and enjoyment. I don’t weigh my food or my body anymore. I fit beauty standards less now than I did in my Beautiful Years, and yet I’m attracting higher quality partners than I did then.

This new energy is born from not giving a fuck about what the media or the patriarchal abusers who run our world say is beautiful. We don’t need makeup or long flowing hair or tiny waistlines to be beautiful. We don’t need to spend half our paychecks pursuing physical “perfection.” We don’t need to cry in front our mirrors because our skin shows signs of aging, or because our bellies are soft and rounded instead of sleek and taut.

We are all beautiful, right now, just as we are. You are. I am. Even if it’s hard to believe, it’s the truth. Everyone is beautiful.

We have the power to change the beauty standards we observe in our own lives, to celebrate our differences and diversity and to stop the addiction to artificial ideas and ideals of what is gorgeous and what is not—but it’s a lot easier said than done.

I’ll leave you with one final thought. Lately, in an effort to remove the filter of conventional beauty standards from my poor, exhausted eyeballs, I’ve been walking through the world imagining everyone I see as a four-year-old child. When you make a practice of this, you start to see that, yes, in fact, everyone is beautiful. Everyone is actually super adorable! It’s easier to love other people, to love the world, and to show up with kindness in public spaces, when you look at it through the Four-Year-Old Child filter rather than the Fuckable-To-Internet-Trolls filter. I encourage you to try it, and let me know what it does for you in the comments.

For me, it’s helped me see the true beauty in the world. It’s everywhere. It’s also helped me feel the difference between being attracted to someone for who they are versus what they look like. The latter is insubstantial and leads to empty hook-ups and a lack of true care and connection; the former is the key to true passion and intimacy.

I’m less “beautiful” than I used to be.

I’m as beautiful as ever.

It feels so good to shake off these chains.