For my very first blog post ever, I want to tell you an extremely personal story. It seems appropriate to begin this way, for it is my aim to expose many things here. Many secrets and many stories that have been long buried and concealed.

And it’s only fair that I warn you I tend to be a bit of an extremist. My desired method of problem-solving and information-hunting is to strip everything away from an area and search for the truths hidden beneath it all, get a whole new perspective.

This means I am often making huge radical changes to various parts of my life just to cleanse my mind and see what happens, as friends and family members stand by looking frightened and concerned and hosting the occasional intervention.

That being said, this is the first story I’d like to tell…

This is where I bare my soul. I may have physical features that our culture finds beautiful in a skin-deep textbook sort of way.

But inside I am angry

Insecure

Bitter

Afraid

Prideful

Selfish

Dark

Obsessive

Wounded

Cold

Empty

Argumentative

Apathetic

Often depressed and anxious

And not just a little.

A lot.

And the truth is, people see these things when they look at me and they may not even know it. These things permeate from inner places and create an aura of their own. They can easily pollute any pleasant outer attributes I may have, like a bad odor in a beautifully decorated room.

Why am I like this, you may ask? There are many reasons. In summary, we are simply a product of our parents, our environment, our culture, our experiences, our beliefs, our choices. There are no excuses. Only cause, effect, and consequence.

But the point is this: I know many people. Some have beauty by cultural standards and yet they are not necessarily attractive. Some are plain or have features our culture does not prize, and yet they exude a great amount of attractiveness.

Years ago I decided I really wanted to analyze the nature of attraction. In doing this I realized the immediate obvious, that attractiveness is simply one’s ability to draw others toward oneself, to attract. This is not a pinpoint-able list of features of course, but a nature that radiates from an individual, causing a magnetic effect on those around them, causing people to want to come closer, be near, know them, enjoy them on some level. I’m sure we have all known someone, that may have even perplexed us, that we were strongly attracted or drawn toward in some way and had no real explanation as to why. I certainly have.

Then there are people who actually repel others from their presence because of what radiates from them. I’m sure you have also known someone who outwardly had the prized features, but just repelled you. I certainly have.

And although I may have a certain level of textbook beauty, I have never been much of an attractor and have actually spent most of my life repelling. So much so that I strongly believed until high school that I was very ugly. I was even called ugly on several occasions growing up. In high school I began to realize I did have physical beauty. But attractiveness is what I wanted and what I could innately sense I did not have.

I did have other attractive qualities however. I was wild and free. I was fearless and self-assured. I was unique and creative and carefree. I was adventurous. These things would draw people in initially, only to lose them shortly afterward as they were repelled from me as some kind of foul character flaw emerged.

I needed to build on my foundation and enhance the ability to secrete the sort of aura that makes people want to come toward you, be near you, be with you. I then spent many years studying people everywhere I went. And what I found were varying degrees of physical beauty and attractiveness paired in each person. Some had a great deal of both. Some had a great deal of one and little or none of the other. Some lacked both.

I also noticed that equal levels of attractiveness draw couples together more often than equal levels of physical beauty. Have you ever known a couple that looks like an odd couple until you get to know them? Where one has notably more physical beauty than the other? You may ask, what does he see in her or she in him? Yet as you get to know them and you perceive their level of attractiveness, they begin to look to you as more equally paired? This is also true for people who, upon meeting someone, are not immediately attracted, but as time passes they become drawn in, begin to desire this person. Or the opposite: drawn in by looks, then quickly repelled by character.

My very simple initial conclusion was of course, that physical beauty and attractiveness are very different things altogether. You need not have one to have the other. You may be thinking, yeah, this is old news.

This may be a tired cliché but it changed me when I experienced it on a deeper level. For it then became my goal to eliminate my long list of dark attributes that were being secreted from my pretty skin, making me less attractive and even at times repellant. It became my goal to one day be old and grey and far more attractive than I ever was in my twenties, to emit the kind of character that people want to draw near to. To glow with it, as an old woman.

Once my perspective was turned toward this truth, the trivial surface things began to fade from my desires. I became more fixated with gaining attractiveness than beauty, character over looks. The things I used to rely on as part of my everyday beauty enhancement began to look to me like silly masks and costumes, sucking my time, energy, and money away. I cared less and less about putting my energy into these as I sought to now find character that would radiate from me, transcending anything I could put on.

While there is certainly nothing wrong with enhancing one’s appearance, when there is true attractiveness involved, these things are a pleasure, an honor to others, not a security shield or an illusion of beauty. When they are used in the wrong way, it is obvious. It looks terrible. When we realize that the darkness in our character seeps out of even the most carefully placed layers of outer beauty enhancement, we find ourselves looking more like actors and actresses in costume, oftentimes obvious to an audience as scripted and fake.

And true to my nature, I decided to run an experiment several years ago. To strip it all away, all the things I tried to do to make myself feel beautiful, and expose my raw, natural, flawed shell to see what would happen. The results changed everything about who I thought I was.

Liked this post? Follow this blog to get more.