On any given day I could scroll through Instagram and see a plethora of pictures of skinny, happy white girls. Instagram has not always existed in my lifetime so I used to flip through magazines and switch on the TV to absolutely any channel and see similar prototypes of blonde haired, blue eyed girls enjoying life with all their friends who look just as happy and just as white.
And I don't know when but the desire for this same pretty, for this intangible happiness grew into me, appearing any time I looked into the mirror. Nothing about my reflection was ever right. Even in passing moments of confidence, this pretty told me I wasn't enough.
When I was 12, I got my first perm. And I can still feel the stomach twisting stinging as the chemical burned my ear or my neck or my forehead. Every morning after I would get up an hour earlier than I needed to to hot comb my hair. And I can still smell the burning, and hear the sizzling of heat damage. I would do anything, I would endure anything for my hair to fall down and swing as I walked, just like the happy white girl’s did. In no time the heat chewed though my hair and left me sadder than I had been before the perm. The desire to be pretty, to be perfect did not go away, but only grew more fierce as pretty proved itself difficult to attain.
When I was 14, I started getting box braids. I'd sit for anywhere between 6 and 10 hours as a Black woman would braid my hair. And this was not an inexpensive endeavour, sometimes costing up to 300 dollars when all was said and done. But I was grateful at least to look like the other Black girls at school, and to have long swinging hair, even if it wasn't blonde or straight. But I couldn't wear braids all year unless I wanted my edges to vanish. So that desire for pretty returned and stayed with me whenever I had to take my beautiful braids out.
When I was 18, I shaved my head. After much deliberation and internal conflict. I had had hair since my earliest memories of self. I had had the desire to attain pretty since my earliest memories of understanding TV. And for every girl I'd ever seen, it was hair that made her pretty, and it was hair that made her a girl. I had to ask myself if I could live without my most outward display of beauty, of girlhood, of womanhood. And who would I be if I was no longer connected to these things?
When I first saw my reflection without hair, a smile and a warm tingling sensation greeted me in the mirror. I was bald -- finally. I walked out of that barber shop proud. And I wondered if other people could see it too. I have never felt as relieved and as confident and as pretty as I do bald. I am free to walk the line between masculine and feminine presentation. I am free to roll out of bed and get ready. I am free not to want pretty and not to spend ever waking moment striving for it.
The real problem of pretty is that its work never stops -- our work for it never ends. Pretty was designed to be impossible to achieve. You'll never be pretty enough. Your hair will never be sleek or straight enough. You will never be thin enough. Your skin will never be clear enough.
And if you’re not white, you never will be. Because if you ever achieve the ideal, most perfect kind of pretty enough you will have no need to buy the newest shampoo, you wouldn't buy the most recently sponsored tummy flattening tea or coolest new diet plan. And no amount of bleaching cream will ever make you white.
The West's idea of pretty, of perfect cookie cutter womanhood is not for everyone. But if you've got enough money and a lifetime to give, you might be able to buy yourself an endless supply of disappointment and failed attempts.
If you ask me we're better off abandoning the concept altogether. Let a body be a body, let us love whoever we love and let us throw away the entire beauty industrial complex while we're at it.
Jam Bridgett (they/she) is a queer student, visual artist and writer of Afro-Jamaican descent in Toronto. They are interested in diaspora, gender, race, sexuality and human connection to the Earth. Their work can be found in Ascend Magazine, Tongue Tied Magazine and Rose Quartz Magazine.