notes-from-a-poor-poet

[notes-from-a-poor-poet]

[notes-from-a-poor-poet]

happiness

[notes-from-a-poor-poet]

beauty and pain

a rough draft for a much longer, much smarter essay to be published later.

Beauty is Pain: A Rumination on Women’s Hidden Suffering

“Beauty Is Pain,”

That’s what my best friend’s mom told me as a she sprayed my already rigid Prom hair with Aquanet a third time. I had been coughing for what felt like ten minutes, and my heels were a half size too small. But none of that mattered, according to Mrs. Hall. So long as I looked beautiful, my pain was unimportant. Or worse, it was even expected.

Women are taught from an early age to expect pain. Whether it be through periods, schoolyard tuants, or what have you, pain is expected. If a boy hurts you, pulls your hair, trips you on your last lap of the relay race, he must have a crush on you. Why else would he want to hurt you so badly?

Pain is persistent, expected, and prevelant for a woman’s everyday life. We must learn to accept it, expect it, but never show it.

Why must our pain be expected yet completely ignored?

“Women are born with Pain built in,” she syas, “it is our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t.”

Our pain is inevitable, expected, but it also must be hidden. Beauty is Pain.

I think about my mother’s pain. How she carries within her the pain of her mother, and I too carry within myself my mother’s pain and her mother’s pain.

In her book the Postcard, Anne Berest describes the ways she carries her grandmother’s pain along with her mother’s pain. Physically, women experience the deepest levels of pain.

“I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?” Sojourner Truth

But this essay isn’t about pitting men and women’s pain against each other like a contest, a poorly-timed pissing contest for whose got it worse. This essay is simply a recognition that women’s pain must remain hidden, it must remain inevitable, and if you are going to suffer, make sure to do it beautifully. Beauty is Pain.

Is Pain what makes a woman? A woman’s ability to suffer beautifully, to cry prettily, and always search for the nearest man for a shoulder to lean. Is this what makes a woman? Beauty is pain.

To be a woman is to suffer beautifully; make your pain palatable, your tears digestible, your grief gorgeous. Beauty is pain.

Is this where I leave you? Standing in a mirror, fixing your hair, wiping your tears, adjusting your makeup. What do we do with this recognition that we are not allowed, as women, to exist in our world without a persistent notion of beauty, at the expense of your suffering.

But we persist. We must change how we let ourselves feel. Scream! Sob! Not pretty, glistening tears you daintily wipeoff with an index finger. No, cry those ugly, snotty tears that make your face blotchy and your throat unbearably sore.

This doesn’t mean we act like “Karen’s” and try and disrupt everyone else’s peaceful days. By no means! It simply means that we allow ourselves to be human. We are not perfect. We are not all deliciously dead paintings in a museum, preserving our pretty pain for the foreseeable future. We must carry our pain, and our beauty, and first regard ourselves as human beings.

We are not figurines or ornaments, created to decorate every room we walk into. We are living, breathing, messy human beings. We have tears in our eyes and cellulite on our legs and dirt underneath our nails.

And we are worthy.

We are worthy of experiencing the wide range of human emotions, and sharing in them the exact moment we feel them. Not bottling them up and placing a beautiful bow on top as if to say Here I Am, yes I’m sad but its alright! I’ve got it all under control and no one is going to even notice the ways I sink my nails so deep into my palms I bleed!

No! We are allowed to feel everything as deeply as we need to in the exact moment we can. Punch the guy in the face for all I care! Just do what is right for you, not what’s pretty.

Beauty is pain. Pain is inevitable. But our pain does not have to be palatable. It does not need to pretty.

Our pain can simply exist, in all its ravenous, capricious forms.

[notes-from-a-poor-poet]

[notes-from-a-poor-poet]

[notes-from-a-poor-poet]

[notes-from-a-poor-poet]

welcome

here i will publish my thoughts: finished, unfinished, mundane, exciting, whatever.

i am unemployed and trying to write my way to some sort of peace.

if no one reads it, oh well. if someone finds solace, oh well. if someone viscerally hates everything i publish, oh well.

these are simply notes from a poor poet...