Through the Looking Glass

Unable to see her own beauty, a woman turns to her mirror for a glimpse of the truth.

By Elizabeth Gilbert

Beauty was not something I'd ever bothered much about. My mother was a nurse and a farmer who kept her nails and hair short out of practicality and owned only one beauty product—the pinkish-red lipstick she used on both her lips and cheeks (and only on super-special occasions, like Christmas Eve dinner). I don't recall specifically being taught that an obsession with beauty was only for vain and frivolous women, but I got the message. So I never paid much attention to my looks—until I hit 30 and went through a nasty divorce, a devastating rebound relationship, and then an early-onslaught midlife crisis. All of which escorted me, for the first time in my life, into the grim land of depression. And this exile to depression carried with it a special bonus feature: the destruction of my self-esteem.

When I use the term "self-esteem" here, I mean it in the most literal and traditional women's-magazine definition: I didn't feel pretty anymore. I'd always felt relatively fine about my appearance—not thinking I was Miss Universe, but not worried about looking hideous either. But depression saturates your whole being, so when I looked in the mirror, I suddenly could see nothing but despair's ugly brown slime dripping down my face. Deeply insecure for the first time ever, I felt a toxic jealousy toward women who I felt were more beautiful than I was (at this moment in my life: everyone). Adding to this pain was a deep sense of humiliation that I even cared about this issue. Since when had I become one of those women who suffer over their appearance?

Worse, I'd recently begun practicing yoga and exploring spirituality, and I'd read enough about the sacred pursuit of detachment to recognize that my obsession over my looks was keeping me far, far off the path of enlightenment. (Imagine, if you will, the Buddha sitting in a trance, thinking, "Man, if only I could lose this double chin, I would be happy...") My shallowness appalled me. Meditation was impossible when all I could do was beat myself up for not being attractive enough, and then beat myself up even more for caring.

At long last, I decided to confess my suffering to Bernadette, a friend who was more deeply steeped in yoga than anyone else I knew. She'd been living in an ashram for almost two decades and led an existence of constant devotional practices. Moreover, unlike some yoginis I'd met, she didn't have a molecule of flakiness about her. In fact, she reminded me of my mother, probably because they were both nurses, both strong, competent, compassionate women who wore their hair and nails short.

With considerable embarrassment, I admitted to Bernadette how unattractive I felt, how insanely jealous I'd become of other women, and how humiliating it was not to be able to transcend this obviously stupid obsession. And I told her that I already knew exactly what she was going to say: that physical beauty is a superficial and meaningless construct of human delusion and that such delusions must be transcended and ignored on the path to God.

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