Visions of Beauty

I never thought myself a dancer. What does the word “dancer” evoke? If your answer is that of an Amazon woman, gray haired and never once having worn a size 8, than I am surely on the right track. That wasn’t your answer? What should become of me, then?
As with most everything in America, we do not meet the ideal. This much I’ve gathered--it includes unbearably blond hair, a gregarious bust line and legs miles long--all South Beach Diet and carb free, sporting pouty lips and a sun-kissed hue.
I am not this person.
You are not this person.
This person doesn’t exist…we exist, though.
We exist with our fat hips and crooked noses, our flabby arms and stretch marks, our short legs and bikini un-worthy bodies.
Let me offer this statement, then--perhaps our “wrongs” make us right. Do you ever recall someone’s perfections--the small pieces of all of us all that might make one ideal? Or do you remember that I am more Boticelli than Pamela Anderson? More so, even, I expect that you recall those things about me that remind you of you, or of those things about me that make me different than you.
And that, I think, is just fine, in fact, that is ideal. To be remembered, to be thought of, to be admired all for my lack of perfection, on account of my lack of perfection.
So for all the reasons I could think of not to dance--too fat, too tall, too graceless--they are now my reasons for dancing.
Self-consciousness has not a thing to do with the body--belief in beauty is beauty alone. It is not tactile or tangible. It is belief and thought and truth, it is you, it is me.
Do not allow false ideas of perfection to hide your beauty--you are your beauty.