I don’t think I’ll ever stop wanting to be beautiful.
Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I don’t know who I am without wanting it.
When I was 11 years old, without fail, I woke up early every morning before school, slipping into the bathroom with a roll of tape and a pair of scissors. Days prior, I had found an eyelift tutorial after weeks of incessant scrolling, convinced it held the antidote to everything wrong with me. I would cut the tape into crescent moons, pressing them against my eyelids, but it would never work. Eventually, the tape would loosen, one eye settling into a double lid while the other remained stubbornly single, as if resisting my desperation.
When I was 11 years old, I pointed out the eyelid tape at the local Asian supermarket to my mom. To her dismay, she told me that I didn’t need it — that I was “already beautiful.” And yes, it was supportive, and yes, that’s how she saw me, but that was no matter — I had already seen all of it. I had seen how my eyes were two different sizes, how the red bumps on my skin crawled up my arms and legs — how this insurmountable distance between who I was and who I yearned to be was never going to change, no matter how many years of my youth I sacrificed chasing after it.
And so, when I was 11 years old — because the tape never worked — I turned to Elmer’s glue, smearing it on my eyelids, praying, hoping, aching. This did work (though I wouldn’t recommend it), but then I would come home and take it all off — and everything would go back to what it was. I would see myself again.
Beauty and I have always been at odds. This, of course, derives from the complexities of simply existing — confidence, insecurity, validation, belonging. Perhaps it began before I had the language to articulate it, before I noticed the canyons between what I had and what others were privileged enough to be born with. Yet, I often suspect that this insatiable, decades-long quest of mine simply was born from something more innate: the desire to simply be enough. As I watched the rest of my world unravel into strings of disappointment and wasted potential beneath my feet, my appearance was something tangible — malleable, even. Something that I could measure, quantify, fix. I could spend the rest of my life picking apart and fixing each smudge in the mirror, waiting for it to either grant my salvation or damnation — at least then, I had control.
To be utterly honest, I’ve spent the entire twenty years of my life crafting a tangled perception of beauty: how it uplifts, divides, and burrows into our minds until we are measuring not just our own reflections, but each other’s worth. Women deemed conventionally attractive are afforded admiration and attention, though even that comes with its own burdens. But what happens when you don’t fit these unattainable standards? Society insists you must make up for it. Be smarter. Be funnier. Be more talented. Because if you are not beautiful, then you must be something else — and if you are neither, then what are you? Where does your worth lie?
As Mitski sings in her song “Brand New City,” “if I gave up on being pretty, I wouldn’t know how to be alive,” — I’ve spent years with this belief that being pretty was something that women must earnestly hold onto, that it decides who is worthy to be heard, and that in this desperate grasping, we become willing to do anything to make it ours. And for so long, this vanity has felt like the most tangible form of worth I could hold onto. If I stopped chasing it, if I stopped trying, then what would be left of me?
This lifelong dilemma is what brought me to “The Substance.” It begins with the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a former Hollywood movie star, being dismissed from her fitness TV show. For years, she had been admired — beloved, envied, seen — yet as she ages, her producer, Harvey, starts to see her as nothing more than trash to be taken out, and eventually fires her.
Later, Elisabeth meets a young nurse who slips a USB in her pocket, referring her to a green fluid known as “the substance,” a miracle that can only be described as her salvation. It promises her a “better version of herself.” Someone that is “younger, more beautiful, more perfect.” It’s a cycle of transformation and decay: inject the serum, birth a new body from your own, nourish one while the other withers. Seven days of bliss (as Sue, Elisabeth’s new perfected body), then seven days back as the original — described as “the balance.”
At the midpoint of the movie, Elisabeth sits at a coffee shop, and surprisingly, across from her, is the young nurse’s other body. He confesses that seven days is long, that seven days is lonely, and that seven days have made it all the more difficult for him to remember that he, too, is someone worthwhile.
“It gets harder each time to remember that you still deserve to exist. That this part of yourself is still worth something. That you still matter.”
“Has she started yet? Eating away at you?”
What struck me most about the film was the revelation that even Sue — designed to embody beauty in its most idealized state — was not immune to the same longing. Towards the end of the movie, the New Year’s show — Sue’s TV hosting debut, the pinnacle of her career — her body begins to deteriorate after months of disregarding the balance, and ultimately turns into the substance. Even she looked in the mirror and saw something missing. Even she wanted more.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what drew me to this indefinable concept of beauty anyways — how we fight against it, how we ache for it, how we grow up differentiating between beautiful and ugly, and how none of it truly matters. What is it that makes beauty feel so essential, so inexplicably intertwined with our worth? Why does it hold so much power over how we see ourselves and how the world sees us in return? If beauty is something that inevitably slips through our fingers, why do we still claw at it until our knuckles bleed, until we are raw and aching, until we have given everything just to grasp onto something that was never meant to be kept? And when it’s gone — when time strips it away, when our facades finally crumble — what is left? If it was never real, if it was never ours to begin with, then why did I spend so much time chasing after it? Can’t I just be beautiful on my own terms?
My partner and I have this recurring bit where she pretends not to see my acne (but truthfully, I don’t think she’s pretending). A couple months ago, when she reassured me again — “I don’t see it” — I wanted to respond, “But I do.”
But maybe that’s the difference between us. She sees me to my core, beyond my skin and hair and clothes and terrible social anxiety and self-perception, beyond the infinite list of flaws I have devoted a lifetime to carving, chiseling, bleeding into. She looks at me and sees someone whole — a heart, a dream, a passion, a life, a soul.
And maybe, just maybe, she’s right.
I look back at my time endlessly chasing after beauty with tenderness and pity. Because truthfully, I love being a woman — I love the gleam in my eyes and the redness in my cheeks and the way I lose my breath when I laugh too hard when I’m with the people I love and the way I carry stories within me that only I will ever fully understand. I love the community of women around me who support and love and see me as I am. I love this love that has enveloped me whole, filling my chest with a life full of joy and curiosity. I look back with pity because for a long time, I thought beauty was something always an inch away — something to be earned, sculpted, perfected. Something that I needed to grasp onto so tightly so I could finally amount to the life that millenniums of histories and crossroads and stories that have led up to mine. Something to justify my existence.
Of course, with maturing comes the gift of not caring as much, but there’s some part of me that’s still that little girl — how desperately she wanted to be heard, how much she longed to feel like enough, and most of all, how she poured herself into the only thing that ever seemed within her control.
Undoubtedly, audiences will finish “The Substance” convinced that they would be smart enough not to take up the deal. That a lifetime of switching and lying and pretending is hardly worth a few months of being young. That they would never lose themselves just to be seen.
And sure, that might be true. Maybe I believe it too. To inject yourself with an unknown green liquid is questionable to say the least, and I don’t think I could endure the pain of having a whole body crawl out of my back either.
But it’s easy to think you’ll stay in control until you’re caught up in it. You’ll tell yourself “I’ll be safe. I’ll be careful. I’ll be logical. I’ll know when to walk away.” But maybe you won’t, especially when there’s nothing more powerful than wanting to be seen and needing to be loved.
So yes — I want to be loved. I want to be seen. I want to be deserving of a life full of joy and wonder and life itself. I want to be beautiful.
Maybe I always have been. Maybe I’m more than that. Maybe I don’t need to be.
MiC Columnist Lia Du can be reached at yutongdu@umich.edu
The post My lifelong pursuit of beauty appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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