Ever since I can remember, I have cared too much about beauty. In one way, this is what spurred me on to explore the visual arts, as I felt special when I could create something that was beautiful. But there was an ugly side to that concern, and it was vanity.

I grew up in Ohio, and would either walk or take the bus to school. When it was snowing outside, my mother would urge me to wear a hat, and I would refuse because I was afraid it would mess up my hair. I also didn’t like the bulky winter coats, because I thought they made me look fat. I do not know where this obsession with looks came from. My mother never emphasized it as far as I can recall, and I didn’t know at that age that she was in a beauty pageant and stepped down from the contest to marry my father.

My grandmother used to say to me and my sister, “You look like a ragamuffin,” which refers to a child in ragged, dirty clothes, but to her it encompassed my outfit as well as my disheveled hair. I remember liking my hair down, but my grandmother would insist I wear it in pigtails, especially when we went swimming. To this day, I feel less feminine with my hair up, which is a whole other tangent.

Oddly enough, even though I cared about my looks, I was a tomboy in my play. I had a favorite toy, a tonka tow truck, that I remember fondly. I liked to climb trees. I had a doll that I performed surgery on by cutting off her hair and putting a row of X’s across her forehead. I’m sure these memories are biased, and my mother could recall more “girl-like” play that I would engage in. Even writing that sounds wrong, from what we know of gender identity today.

In my twenties I read a lot of books about navigating your way into a career, and one exercise in particular lead me to admit that I was vain. The concept was presented that you walk into a party, and the question posed was, “How do you judge people?” Among the choices were judgement by intellect and attractiveness, and I realized that I walk into a room and size up where I fit on the beauty scale. Am I the third prettiest, am I the ugliest? I tried to make up for my lack of beauty with my kindness, so I would smile and ask a lot of questions.

Recently I had an appointment with my psychiatrist, and once again I had to contemplate my odd relationship with myself when it comes to beauty. I gained a lot of weight on an antipsychotic, but it is working so well for me that my doctor put me on and anticonvulsant with a side effect of weight loss. Another side effect of the anticonvulsant is cognitive deficits, and while I haven’t experienced too many deficits, we are raising my dose, so I may experience more. I feel like I am choosing my weight loss over my mental acuity.

These thoughts have brought up so many more questions than answers, and just scratched the surface of many topics. What is beauty, femininity, self-esteem, achievement, and identity?

Margaret Attwood wrote in her novel Cat’s Eye , “Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet.”

Will I ever be ready? Are we all vain to some degree? What does it feel like to feel beautiful?