The Pretty One by Brown Keah

Author:Brown, Keah [Brown, Keah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Writing
ISBN: 9781982100551
Goodreads: 43320228
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2019-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

THE PRETTY ONE

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All my life I have wanted to be beautiful. I long to be desired by readers of magazines and audiences of movies and TV shows. My heart has raced as I watched red carpets and closed my eyes to imagine myself there, too, in those designer dresses and jumpsuits, smiling arm in arm with Reese Witherspoon, Oprah, or Mindy Kaling long before they starred in A Wrinkle in Time together, because in these fantasies we are friends, genuine ones who can talk about anything. When we first met, they had their questions about my disability as people often do, but we talked about it and moved on. They never wanted brownie points for being in my life. In these fantasies, my body and my face were on Getty Images the next morning, my name on all the best-dressed lists. I still dream of this. I long for the custom dress designed by Christian Siriano, Carolina Herrera, or Zac Posen. My friend Danielle and I text each other during red-carpet award shows just to fawn over the outfits and discuss which ones we would love to wear. Beauty for me is just as much about fashion as it is about anything else. I do not have the budget I need for the fashion I love, for the aesthetic I dream of, but even if I did, you don’t see bodies like mine on your red carpets, in your movies, and on your TV screens. You don’t—but you will, because I am coming for them.

There are many people who believe that discussions of beauty are futile and unimportant. I am not one of those people. I understand that there is more to a person than his or her physical appearance, and I agree with this, while I also understand that we live in a society and culture that give physical attractiveness real weight and merit. There is nothing wrong with recognizing your own beauty or the beauty in others and, with consent, speaking about that beauty. The intricacies of beauty and the decisions of who is and isn’t beautiful fascinate me. As a disabled person, living in a disabled body, I am not supposed to be beautiful, but I have been proving people wrong all my life, so why stop now? The truth is, most people don’t expect you to feel beautiful or to think of beauty on any level outside of envy as human beings. History shows that when you ask most people about what they think is beautiful or attractive, you won’t find disability on their lists.

Believe it or not, I get it. I once felt that way, too, the deep desperation for distance from my disability. My disability was supposed to be a thing that people could learn to ignore or pretend didn’t exist long enough to learn to love me. After all, that’s what I was doing, trying my best to ignore it in the hopes that it would get bored and go away, so I wasn’t going to blame others if they decided to do the same.

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