How to Be Beautiful Without Owing Anyone Anything

Notes from a Reluctant Main Character

We’re all obsessed with our image, whether we admit it or not. We live in a world where we see thousands of faces a day. Our brains weren’t meant for this. They weren’t meant to perceive this many people, or to be perceived by them. And it’s doing something to us.

Someone asked me recently how I do what I do. How I have the guts to be so outgoing. In 2019, I had barely any social media presence. I was coming out of a truly awful relationship. The year before, I almost died.

There was nothing left to lose.

I used to be conservative with how I looked. I went to Catholic school. I didn’t rebel, not really. (Though I was thrown out a couple times for reasons that were... specific.) I played it safe. I wasn’t pursued. If anything, I was a tomboy. An outcast. I skipped my high school photos. I didn’t go to my university graduation. You won’t find many photos of me in my 20s. I didn’t want to be seen.

But I’m an artist. I know that now. I don’t care what people call it. It’s just who I am. So when I hit the reckoning of my mid-thirties, I decided I wanted to exist. I liked being in front of the camera. I liked building something. A feeling. A community.

I didn’t think I was hot. I still don’t think I’m all that and a bag of chips, as the kids say. But I do like aesthetics. I do like expression. To get there, I had to block everyone I knew online and just be visible to strangers. That made me feel sovereign in a way I didn’t totally understand.

Now and then I remind myself not to define myself by my looks. That reminder gets louder with age. I’m forty now. I can’t run around in lace and silk and expect people to take me seriously — and yet they do.

Because in the end, you have to be undefinable.

I like hearing what people think I do. A model. An actress. A dog rescuer. A political analyst. A musician. Or my favourite: a professional redhead.

And maybe that’s the point, that you can let the world project onto you whatever it needs to, and still hold something entirely your own underneath. You can be many things at once and none of them entirely true. You can be watched and still be invisible, adored and still unknown, open and still not touched. There’s something oddly powerful about being mistaken for someone else over and over, and deciding not to correct them. You learn to let it happen. You learn to gather the glances and the questions and the misreadings like confetti, like offerings, like clues. And some night, usually the ones when you're alone and your dog’s snoring softly and there’s nothing remarkable happening, you realize you’ve become the person you always wanted to be. Not in the ways you imagined. Not rich. Not famous. But undeniably and rudely alive. And no one can take that away from you.