Own the Ugly

Make your flaws an asset.

Rossy de Palma for Harper’s Bazaar, Spain

Most women desire beauty (in whatever form or definition it takes for them). The desire is natural and hardly pathological. However, social and cultural approaches, standards and discourses about beauty can often bring anxieties and insecurities. The body positivity movement was an attempt to counteract the “standard” and allow women of different and diverse forms and shapes to feel beautiful. A degree of body positivity is crucial for a woman because not being at peace with her physical form and her body is a major obstacle on her path towards wholeness.

In the neurosis and anxiety inducing culture, the quest of beauty often becomes the quest for perfection. And somewhere on that journey, you begin comparing and obsessing over every perceived flaw or blemish. The quest for perfection and “standard” often leads to uniformity of appearance that we see many nowadays complain of — we often hear how everyone looks the same since they do the same cosmetic procedures, wear the same clothes and aim for the same look. It is natural and expected, as majority of people will generally seek to blend in. But at the same time, we all in a way agree that a very high degree of uniformity is dystopian and hardly makes a world more beautiful.

Obsessing over what you consider (or even culture and society) to be flaws, thinking you have to look a certain way to be loved or worthy of gifts is but another form self-obsession. It traps you inside your own smallness and you believe that the world and the other’s capacity to love or see beauty is as limited as yours. If there is some part of yourself that you hate or reject, nothing will offend you more than being loved “in that part” — it will reveal your subconscious expectation and desire to be hated and rejected.

The way out of obsessing over the flaws are two: either get a cosmetic procedure that will alter it or “own” the flaw, which is what I mean by “own the ugly.” Maybe you feel yourself too this or that, maybe you think your hair could be thicker, straighter, curlier, your breasts larger, this or that. The way out of that mental prison is to fully own the flaw. Not even in the body positivity way, not even thinking you need to convince anyone that it is beautiful or hot (if they do not think so), not even needing to call it “beautiful” to yourself or anything such, but rather to approach it with an attitude of: “Yes, it is a flaw, it may even be ugly, but I do not care, I enjoy it, it is idiosyncratic, it is me.” Owning it not in a way you wallow in self-pity or in excessive self-adoration (which is but insecurity masking itself), but in a way that expresses a complete acceptance of everything that is.

In the photo above is Rossy De Palma, a Spanish actress and model who was often labeled as “ugly and strange” — she could have changed her appearance to avoid the label, but her choice was to lean into it. She met the film director Pedro Almodóvar while working as a waitress in a rockabilly bar and has since been his friend and a muse, featured in many of his films. The point is even while being what many may consider “ugly and strange”, she was an artist’s muse and capable of inspiring works of art. An artist venerated her and perhaps saw in her a beauty that was hidden from the average eye. Most women, including very beautiful ones, can hardly move someone that much.

Perhaps it is worth to mention that many of the great women were not considered the greatest beauties. There are claims that say that Cleopatra was rather average. Or we could say that many women are beautiful but very few create legacies or “move” anything. You know many pretty girls, but how many of them can get a Cesar to fight her battles? Very few, if any. I am not saying you should care for a great legacy or to be remembered as Cleopatra, but you can’t move things even in your own “small” life — it is all stagnation upon stagnation and it frustrates you.

“Owning the ugliness” adds to the magnetism and power of such women because once “owned”, it means that it cannot be used against them. You have conquered yourself, you have conquered your own harsh eye that prevents the life from flowing freely thorough you, and in doing so, you remain immune to the harsh eye that comes from the outside.

A woman’s power is in her ability to inspire art, acts of love, heroism, to inspire wars, to inspire peace — in short, in her ability to move and generate energies that create the existence and experience. It is very important for women to feel powerful — it is not an egoic power, but the power of cosmos and of nature. Would Earth be Earth without the power of the tremors that come from her depths, crushing an entire city in a minute? Does she hold back from crushing the city and killing thousands?