10/05/2026
Before We Knew We Were Beautiful
I was once beautiful.
I just didn’t know it.
I remember the acne, scattered across my face. My brown, wiry hair seemed determined never to cooperate. I was chubby, too—enough to notice beside boys whose bodies seemed to know exactly what they were doing.
And puberty came late. The showers after gym class offered no privacy and no mercy. I learned to keep my eyes down and disappear while standing naked with other boys.
And there was another secret I carried. Not really a secret, because I didn’t yet know what it was. Just a feeling. Something I was afraid someone might see.
Growing up in the 1970s, there were things a boy could learn to fear before he had words for them. So I became careful—about what I said, what I looked at, what anyone might see in me.
There was no reason for a child to carry that kind of fear.
But I did.
I thought I was ugly. Different. Not enough.
And all the while, my life was happening. People loved me. There were summer evenings, music, laughter, friendships, mistakes, kisses, disappointments, beginnings and endings. Ordinary days I did not recognize as precious until they became memories.
I thought I was waiting to become beautiful. But beauty was never coming. It was already there.
Maybe that is the cruel joke of youth. We are too close to ourselves to see the whole picture. We see the acne, but not the face. The awkward body, but not the life it will carry.
I wish I could put my hand on that boy’s shoulder and tell him to stop trying to disappear. To lift his chin. To look again.
The face he wanted to change would one day become a face he would miss. The body he wished away would one day be the body he would give anything to have back.
He was beautiful. He had always been beautiful.
He just couldn’t see it.
When all along—
we were beautiful before we knew we were beautiful.
And now, finally, I know.
That is the sorrow of it: I spent so many years believing I wasn’t.
By the time I stepped far enough away to see the whole forest—
the forest was already behind me.
