this latest quote in the New York Post just really bums me out. Really, it’s a series of quotes combined together that have been getting to me. Let me demonstrate what I mean:
”I look at photographs, the ones that people ask me to sign sometimes, and think, “What are people seeing?” I have had this face for 35 years. I’m never going to change it. But I wouldn’t desire me. I can see beauty in other men. Ryan Gosling? Fuck. George Clooney? Wow. But you can see the enigma in those kind of faces. But I can’t see it in myself at all.” (Margy Rochlin, New York Post, May 5, 2012)
“This face. It’s kind of long. Horsey. Not as in “rah” but as in equestrian… It’s very period, is what I’m trying to say. I’m a bit of an oddity in a modern context. It’d be really nice to wake up looking like, I don’t know, Jake Gyllenhaal and think “Let’s try this on for a day and see how it feels”. But I’ve tried very hard not to be typecast as the posh character in period dramas. That’s the thing I’ve been kicking against — to try and shift class and period and perception all the time.” (Esquire, July 23, 2010)
“What do you most dislike about your appearance? The size and shape of my head. I’ve been likened to Sid from Ice Age.” (Rosanna Greenstreet, The Guardian, 6 January, 2012)
“What is the worst thing anyone’s ever said to you? A blog that said, “The talentless wooden acting of arse-named, horse-faced twot Benedict Cumberbatch.” (Rosanna Greenstreet, The Guardian, 6 January, 2012)
”I’m not gorgeous. But at least I don’t have to worry about taking precious care of my face because it’s my commodity.” (15 August, 2010, Sunday Times)
I don’t particularly enjoy writing fanmail really because it makes me feel silly and I figure it just sits in a box somewhere anyways. Not that I have anything against it, or that I think it’s all ignored. It’s great. It’s just not my division. But I can’t put the thought out of my mind and I sit here wondering how other people reading these quotes are thinking. So I’m making it an open letter because it’s just a blog post anyways.
Now maybe these quotes are just an availability heuristic at work. It’s not like there are fifty of them.
Yet I hate to see someone I admire feeling down about themselves, and I know that we all feel that from time to time, but this has come through enough that I can’t sit on my hands anymore.
I think that often in our lives we’re made to feel “not good enough”. We’re too loud, too quiet, too dumb, too smart, too fat, too thin, too opinionated, too ignorant, and not enough ___. If we could just keep reshaping ourselves, if we could tear out those imperfections in ourselves and become enough of that ceaseless quality in the blank, maybe then we think, maybe we’d be good enough. After all, it’s not often we hear differently. Or believe it.
Certainly not in a time of media submersion, a wealth of advertisements reminding us that we are indeed flawed. Couple that with society’s expectations and our raging battle for self-identity as we try to cram ourselves into those pigeon holes.
Maybe it’s in that din that we forget that beauty can also be found in imperfection. Perfection isn’t the same as beauty, after all. Or happiness or love or inner peace for that matter.
In ourselves, I think, it’s difficult to appreciate those simple imperfections that make us unique. It’s hard for us to perceive something that we see in ourselves as a flaw as a virtue in someone else’s eyes.
(Recognizing the subjective use of “imperfections” to refer to anything that deviates from that image of a flawless human. )
What’s really getting to me I think is the, “I wouldn’t desire me.” And the “I can see beauty in other men. But I can’t see it in myself at all.”
Maybe you can’t see it, but others certainly aren’t lying when they say that they can. A bird can’t see itself making circles on a sun swept sky, but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful to the one looking up from the ground.
So while you might not see your face as beautiful, many people do. I do. I don’t think that being born with Ryan Gosling or George Clooney’s face is what makes a person beautiful.
Now I don’t know what it’s like for any actor to be struggling to escape boxes and fit other boxes to make a role and a living. Not personally. But I do know that the media’s idea of beauty is not reality. We are not what magazines and morning shows and advertisements tell us to be. That is a very narrow, suffocatingly exclusive, and may I say boring idea of human beauty.
People are so much more diverse, unique, different, and beautiful than this narrow mindset affords us.
Why should we walk through life feeling like less because we aren’t the spitting image of beauty expectations in the time that we were born?
Why should we tear ourselves down for flaws we assign to ourselves, when in fact what we see as an imperfection may be beauty and/or perfection to another?
It breaks my heart to hear another person say “I wouldn’t desire me.” Because I know it’s simply not true that you’re undesirable. There’s someone in this world that can see the beauty in each of us even when we can’t see it in ourselves. I also know what it feels like to say that about yourself. In those times, I try to remember other’s faith in me until I can find it in myself again.
So let me help you see it in yourself. And to everyone reading this blog. Please remember that there is beauty in you too. Not just beauty visually, either. I mean that wonderful spark in you that makes you you. You may not always see it or feel it, but be patient with yourself. I’m not saying I have all my shit figured out or that I like myself all the time. Does anyone? If you do you have got to let me in on your secret (though I may suspect that you’re just Tony Stark). But what I’m saying I guess is that I don’t like seeing people I admire feeling down on themselves (especially about your face), I don’t like seeing myself feel down, and I certainly don’t want any of you feeling down. People can be really shitty to each other on the internet sometimes, but we can also choose to be better than that.
sigh-Ben just doesn't get it, and most other people don't either. But we are ALL beautiful in some way,
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