Brains over Beauty

One of my many struggles has been to find time to fulfill all of my various ambitions. Throughout high school, the highest among these (in my mind) have always been: become well-rounded and accomplished, build strong friendships, cultivate my relationship with God, have a hot body. In that order. Looking at the list, it is easy to spot the thing that doesn't belong, but thanks to a culture with a screwed (and I mean that in both senses) view of morality, having a "hot" body made the list. Thankfully, I never lost my sense of the other things that are truly important in life, but thoughts and desires for my appearance were always in the back of my mind, festering, feeding insecurities. My moral compass was out of wack.

Recently, I've been able to reset my priorities so that they look like this: cultivate my relationship with God, build strong friendships, become well-rounded and accomplished, be healthy. The first three in the list I often attend to out of order, but the Holy Spirit has been sending me a lot of reminders about what comes first, and I'm working on putting that into action. Notice, however, that there is still a fourth item on the list. It is a legitimate priority, and I am dedicated to making sure that I take care of myself. But. Under this healthy heading, I have still managed to squeeze in the idea of having a nice body, a Hollywood body, a body which I am not designed to have.

In our Torrey session tonight we discussed Plato's Symposium under the director of the program, Dr. Reynolds. We talked about many hard and heart-wrenching things, but there is one topic I want to address specifically. We observed, both in the text and our knowledge of culture, that the attractive people garner the most attention from the public, but they are not the intellectuals of our society. This is not because beautiful people are stupid. It is because the attractive people (in the view of society) have to spend too much time on their appearance to be well-read and generally informed. You cannot have both brains and beauty, unless you are fortunate enough to come by them naturally. The simple fact of the time involved forces you to choose one or the other. And tonight, I'm choosing brains.

If I want to accomplish the first three things on my list, I don't have time to spend worrying about having a hot body. I can still be healthy, but spending extensive time working on my physique every day is just not possible. I've known this for a long time, but now I've come to accept it. I don't want people to give me their attention because I'm attractive. I want them to give me their attention because I am interesting, intelligent, informed, and unique.

Someday, God willing, a man will fall in love with me. He will love me not because of my beauty, but because of my brains. More importantly, he will love me not for what's in my head, but what's in my heart.

That's who I want to be.