I hate beauty.

If you’ve been here before you know I have a thing for provocative titles. It’s not just a tactic to lurer you in; I really mean these things. And today I'm here to say: I hate beauty. I’m also afraid of it. I also reject it. I remember as a child I would see something intriguing—a leaf, a feather, a crack in the sand—and I would destroy it. It felt insulting and pointless to stare at these beautiful objects of my desire. After all, what were they doing for me expect reminding me of my own vulnerability? My own misplaced femininity. My own vulgarity. So I smashed them like I smashed my self-esteem. I couldn’t take it. I didn’t want to preserve it, I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to have to care that much about any one aspect of nature. I didn’t know what else to do with my melted anger.

I hate beauty because then I get lost in perfectionism. I begin to obsess and can only see what is the matter. I wonder if that shade of lipstick really is any good at all. And then I see the creases in my lips where the cracks show my age. And then I keep zeroing in and take apart the elements of grace and love and everything slowly begins to fade. What even is beauty, anyway? Beauty in the modern world turns me into Goldilocks, but I am rarely satisfied. I have to keep hunting. In fact, it might just be the chase. Beauty is like fragments of glass I try to put back together. Beauty becomes gibberish. So I step back and look at the wide open vistas of room, or city, or landscape and allow that to move through me instead. Big nature can sometimes bypass this negativity in me. That is, until the trash begins to float by and carries me away in a sea of plastic.

Beauty is so vulnerable and impermanent. Why can’t beauty ever stay? Why do these flowers have to wilt and go away? When I was younger I would listen to a song over and over, a million times over. Finally, it felt like, stability. I would find beauty in a song, or rather, the feelings generated by a song, and I would extract every ounce of emotional calm until it was all gone. I wish I could say it was a few minutes, or a few days, but sometimes one song went on for weeks.. or months. What insanity. Eventually I would have to find a new song to fill the hole left behind by the used up single one, but in the meantime I found something stable in its endless repeating. It was as if I could control what was happening inside me by enlisting a fixed structure of song outside me. This was my attempt to find beauty, but of course, that eventually went away. Damn you, beauty.

And what is it the rest of you are doing to find an anchor to land your emotional landscape? Today my habits looks much different.

I hate beauty because it takes work. As a child my father would chide the politicians for cutting artistic funding, “Where do they think the symphony comes from? They come from the kids who become adults and practice everyday.” See, beauty takes work. And beauty in schools is the first thing to go. That’s why I don’t like beauty. It takes a lot of work and sometimes money and I don’t have that kind of discipline, that kind of stamina, that kind of vision. I also didn't have someone to show me the way.

I’m afraid of beauty because it will leave me behind. If you stop to admire the roses, even if you don’t pick them, even if you don’t smell them, you may not find your way back. This world doesn’t wait for anyone to catch up. So those moments where spending extra moments in nature’s garden is frightening when you worry you don't belong. So I better speed up because the world is not waiting for me, or anyone. Survival, in a practical sense, is not based on the sway of grass through the trees. So don’t admire it. It’s ugly anyway.

Beauty isn’t productive, either. Beauty gets in the way of the important things I have to do. Like work. Beauty is the archenemies of work. It used to be, long, long ago in a far off place, that work was a gift because it was your spiritual duty to show off your talents. Our work was a divine creation and our primary job on Earth was to impress the spirits and lavish them with our formations. Work was the big “thank you” to the universe for being alive. Then work became distorted and exploited and beauty began to go away. Now beauty is relegated to certain times and places and has nothing to do with how we spend our days.

I’m also afraid of beauty because it is an act of love. Beauty engenders love. I hate love, too. Love is a lot of work. Beauty makes me feel deeply and that is too scary, so shut it down. Break the sandbar to bits because the numbness of loss is easier then the heartbreak of love. And beauty does break your heart. Beauty takes you to other worlds. Beauty is intimate and unapologetic. What happens when beauty starts apologizing for existing? You end up looking in the mirror and seeing only dysfunction. You pathologize your fingernails for growing. You regret being happy. And on top of this, beauty makes me feel ugly. I’m not sure I am deserving of beauty or what beauty creates. I poison it, smudges it’s corners, ruin the magnificent painting or it’s curtains. I feel like a stain. I am still that ugly duckling alone in the Tv room. Don’t love yourself because you are not beautiful anyway; that’s what the media is saying.

I also hate beauty because it's vulnerable. Have you seen a flower? It is not the gnarled up roots of an Oak. Flowers evaporate when you star at them. I want to be hard and thick like a trunk. I want to stabilize in dirt. I want to get braver when the storm comes. Beauty is weak and requires someone to protect it. Who has time for that? Maybe if we lived in a collective. Individual beauty can so easily get washed away.

But I also want to change. Maybe I will stop being a trunk and gain the wisdom of a shrub. Maybe I will shrink to a jasmine vine. Perhaps someday I will grow into a hardy Magnolia blossom. I don’t know that I will ever become a pansy or an orchid flower. I don’t know if I can ever become that delicate. Perhaps a rose bush will have me. Maybe someday I will become more vulnerable, or I will show off more of my petals, or maybe I will turn into a new species of flower all together.

Sometimes I think beauty is supposed to be flawless, like when all the earrings are matching. Like those people who endlessly look like their life is always going in one direction. I’m a mess. I will power-clash forever. I will never match and I will never be walking one path at a time. I will change directions abruptly. I am both/and/yes all at once. Somethings will stay forever while most of it will go repeatedly. I will experiment and play and be curious about something completely different from day to day. So by my flawed definition of beauty, I will never be that.

But I also define beauty as spontaneous and found in small places. Beauty wraps in coils around your heart. Beauty is transparent, opaque, and completely elusive all at once. Beauty is feeling beautiful despite the external circumstance. That kind of beauty, in particular, is the wizardry of the modern world. Despite it all, we have fun. Beauty is the joy of finding it when at first it appears there is none. Beauty is going outside. But I hate going outside because eventually I have to go back inside. And with all that beauty, what do I do with it? I want to smash it all like the patriarchy. To hell with beauty, it’s not for me.

I so badly want to leave those last words hanging around your neck and to have this whole thing float by like a mysterious epic of wonder and introspect. But, well, I don’t know I’ve written anything that profound. And second, it wouldn’t be fair, to me or anyone else.

Beauty can be so evasive sometimes that I get lost is trying to imagine and rearrange the pieces in new ways. This can admittedly overwhelm me. It leaves me stupefied as to whether I should prioritize my bank account or that gnawing feeling inside that wants things to look a certain way. We are wired for beauty. We are wired to go towards that radical thing called pleasure. That’s a big buzz word these days but it’s not that different from the art of joy, the act of contemplation, that desire to rest our eyes on the animist forces of nature, to feel the soft places of tender or the hard places newness.

But the real reason I write all this is because we are destroying it. And beyond that, I wonder if we are beginning to believe we don’t deserve it. And beyond that, I wonder if it becomes easier to harm the world when it all just turns into lifeless objects of unattractive, banal, matter.

I’m going to make a huge stretch here so just go along, if you don’t mind. I wonder if the politicians and the powers that be look out at the world and hate their reflection so much they need to advert their gaze. I wonder if they stare out at the world, seeing beauty and charm, and feel so utterly removed from that grander that it is easier to cause harm. I wondering if the joy of a flower—whether in a garden, or in the from of (trans) person—reflect their self-hate and that boils over into rage. I believe that desire to harm love can only come from buried hurt deep inside.

This writing is not a letter to find excuses for the physical and existential suffering of power differentials. This is just my attempt to make sense of things that don’t make sense. This is my research paper on love. This is me unwinding into my penchant to let go of patriarchy and shame. I research my insides and find threads that help me relate. This is my way to connect to the joy of flowers of all types. This is me grappling with the complexities of beauty and beauty standards and what is popular on Instagram. I don’t want the world to be an ugly place and I don’t want it homogenized into beige-at-best. And at the same time, we are inundated from every angle with the world’s attempts to make us feel small and bad about every aspect of who we are. Sometimes that is through commercials, sometimes that is through bills. So, I leave no conclusion, just questions and contemplation, and a call to action, and a prayer that mean something, and love to anyone excluded from the narrowing circle of who matters.