Rachel Setzer

X-posted from Art of the Possible

I did not create this image. I found it in a google image search.If this is your image, thanks for making it. Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: beauty and pretty are not the same thing. A conventionally attractive person is no more guaranteed to be beautiful than a conventionally unattractive person or a person who is just sort of average-looking. Beauty isn’t about outside stuff, beauty is about inside stuff. You and me, we have beauty if we choose to cultivate it; if we decide to show it off through our choices and behaviors. What’s more, the image at left is 100% true. Beauty exists in each of us independent of the decorations we don. As RuPaul says, “You’re born naked, everything else is drag.” But, if it’s what is inside that really counts – and really, everything starts with character – how do we reconcile the desire to bare our naked beauty for all its value with the desire to be seen as physically attractive or the desire to feel pretty? Can these two things coexist? Is beauty only in the eye of the beholder? Can we really get by in the world ignoring what other people think about how we look?