it is hot and it is beautiful. I’ve been living at my parents house for a month and a half. my room is the attic now and it is bright and wide and lofty. the floor is made of soft sunfaded cork, perfect for lying on. I had posters up for the first month but early summer heat began to melt the painters tape and one by one they peeled themselves off the drywall. I have my dad’s guitars and all the books I could care to read. I am uninspired nonetheless

this summer I have been trying my best to become less beautiful. it’s mostly an experiment.

the summer after ninth grade I learned to draw emaciated figures in my diary. I conducted extensive research on brazillian hair straightening treatments. I box dyed my hair cherry red for the very last time. I walked up and down big suburban hills in a long green dress and doc martens listening to the sisters of mercy out loud on my phone speaker.

the summer after tenth I worked my first summer job at a science themed summer camp and wore the same straight cut blue jeans and green shirt every day and then never again. I started lifting weights, push pull legs five times a week. I read the idiot on the bus to and from work; I kept a piece of lined paper filled with character descriptions as a bookmark. I learned to pose for photos.

the summer after eleventh I spent growing out too-short april bangs only to cut them again as soon as school was back in session. I pierced my bottom lip in honor of a girl I had fallen in love with at summer camp two years earlier. I tanned on purpose for the first time and got so sunburnt that I had tan lines well into november. I didn’t straighten my hair for a whole month.

summer after twelfth I bleached all my hair and became the pretty blonde clawing at the back of my mind since I was four years old. I wore the same pink tank top and light wash jeans every day and then never again. I spent hours driving my mom’s minivan through ontario eggbasket countryside with the windows down, passing mennonite horse-and-buggies a few every hour. I didn’t go a single day without straightened hair.

I’ve been thinking about cognitive dissonance. I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t continue to claim to hold the beliefs I do while acting so opposite them. If so much of beauty is a construct developed in order to justify and maintain material inequality, a sentiment I have claimed to believe some iteration of since I was fourteen years old, why has so much of my life been wholly devoted to it? how have I ever gotten out of bed and curled my hair at the risk of being late to lecture, how have I put myself at risk of skin cancer, how have I gone weeks without playing guitar for the privilege of flimsy press on nails? it’s humilliating. what ever was the point if I knew all along in the most precise terms how detrimental it was to my soul?

I am being dramatic and I feel almost as if I am embodying some kind of slave morality with my anti-beauty rhetoric. beauty certainly feels hedonistic when you do it right, and not even a crude hedonism but the more complicicated iteration of enduring pain for the promise of greater pleasure. to be beautiful, in the contexts in which I have been beautiful, kept me safe, opened doors, created experiences. I don’t regret a bit of the time I spent coiffing my hair or whatever, because I was good at it, it was effective. I think my world would have been so much smaller had I not done so. now I am bored and I am trapped in a sense. to stop eating now or wax my legs or what have you would make me a sellout and yet I am so easily bought by the promise of life. I don’t know how to live if not through the lens of beauty and now it is hot and it is bright and it is lofty and I am so lost and lifeless. I’ve been memorizing Sappho. When I was thirteen I worshiped Aphrodite for a while and I feel she revisits me sometimes. Someday I will read Andrea Dworkin and I’ll write something meaningful on the whole matter, but for now this is all.