You Are More Than Your Face
Beauty is weird.
Beauty is associated with value. If you’re not beautiful, you’re not considered as valuable. On the flip side, if you are beautiful, you can’t openly say that or you’re conceited. So you have to try your hardest to be beautiful, all the while pretending you haven’t noticed.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
People will go to insane lengths to feel beautiful. They’ll spend thousands of dollars. They’ll literally have someone cut into them in an operating room to change how they look. They’ll buy all the most expensive creams and clothes. Just to feel like others find them beautiful.
Ultimately, beauty is just wrapping paper. Gifts are given in beautiful packages. But when you get the gift, all you really want to know is what’s inside. The same goes with a person.
Have you ever met someone you thought was gorgeous, but as you talked to them and got to know them they seemed less attractive? Or the opposite can be true too. Sometimes you meet someone you don’t find that attractive, and as you get to know them they become more attractive to you.
Beauty is the shiny wrapping paper. But the gift is what’s inside. Otherwise, it’s just an empty container.
Most people (myself included) have judged someone based on appearance. We’re basically conditioned to. It’s freakishly normal and I hate it.
What It Feels Like
I didn’t feel like a beautiful woman for at least the first half of my life. I didn’t feel ugly either. Just sort of middle ground in the looks department. We aren’t supposed to say it, but I like to think I’m beautiful now. Like an ugly duckling situation, I was a bit of a late bloomer.
At my High School graduation, I looked like I was graduating from Middle School. I was soft, round, and looked very young. Not just my face, but my whole persona. I didn’t know anything about clothes or makeup. I was shy and insecure.
I often got compared to my pretty friends, and the many lovely women in my family. I felt like I was lined up next to pretty people everywhere and continuously fell short. I felt like the odd duck out.
This led to many years of feeling self-conscious. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown into myself more. I learned to love myself, learned how to work out and eat right. And as I aged, my wrapping paper got a little shinier. Sometimes I think I got more attractive because I learned how to love myself, but that’s a post for another day.
Through all that, I’d still have moments of insecurity though. Those old pathways in my brain wanted to hang on.
Growing up in a family of beautiful women, a lot of value was placed on how you looked. “Don’t cut your hair, you won’t look as good.” “Suck in your stomach when you’re standing.”
My mom was a beautiful woman. I mean gorgeous. People treated her differently because of it. Some treated her better because they wanted her. Some treated her worse because they were jealous of her. But everywhere she went, someone would comment on it. My friends would whisper, “Wow! You’re mom is so pretty!”
As my mom grew older, her appearance started to change. She didn’t age gracefully because of her lifestyle. And that was really hard for her. She had tied her identity to how she looked on the outside. She thought the wrapping paper was who she was.
If she wasn’t beautiful, who was she?
I watched her grapple with getting older, a fight none of us will win. I knew even then I didn’t want that for myself. I wanted to be okay with getting old. But I wasn’t sure I would be. Was I destined to struggle the same way?
I’d finally reached a point in my life where I felt I was pretty enough. I was never going to be a supermodel, but I felt pretty happy with myself. I didn’t really own it, or feel comfortable with who I was in my skin, but I was okay. At least I thought so. I didn’t really have the confidence to back it up, but I was in a place I thought could be enough.
Then God Taught Me a Lesson
Most often, I don’t even know I need the lesson until God throws it at me. The same thing with this one. I felt like I’d done the work and I was as pretty as I was going to get and that was okay.
But the lesson came anyway. One night I was cooking bacon as part of my dinner. It was a high-quality bacon without preservatives or nitrates and nitrites. So I wanted to save the grease. I carefully poured the grease into a jar and left it in the sink.
A few minutes later, I wanted to wash some of the dishes so I carefully lifted the jar out of the sink. It had a little dribble of grease on the outside of the jar so I grabbed a paper towel to wipe it off.
I was moving slowly knowing it was still hot. When I went to wipe the jar with the paper towel, I felt it burn my finger. And I jumped. With a jar of hot grease in my hand, I jumped.
What happened next was like an out-of-body experience. It was like it wasn’t even me. Careful Holly, could not have just jumped and splashed hot bacon grease onto her face and chest. That can’t have just happened. But it did.
I frantically ran to the sink, ripping my grease-soaked shirt off on my way, and stuck myself under cold water. I tried to wipe some of the grease off my face, and my skin came off in my hands. I was in shock.
I called my husband at the time and told him I needed to go to the hospital. I called a doctor I know and confirmed that I did in fact need to go to the hospital. (I was still hoping it wasn’t bad enough for that).
They got me right in at the ER and cleaned me up. They told me I had second-degree burns on my face and chest and would need to go to the burn center a few hours away.
At first, it just looked like the skin was missing. Not too bad. But it was skin my face. Faces being very important in my family. So important that my mom’s first question when I called her wasn’t “Are you okay” and was actually “Are you going to have scars?”.
It wasn’t that she didn’t care. My mom loved me very much. But the only thing she felt she ever had was her beauty. It was an asset to her, one she wanted for her daughters as well.
Do you want to know what I was thinking at this point? If you’d asked me to predict how I would have felt, I would have said I’d be worried about scars or that my face would never look the same. But I wasn’t. It was the weirdest thing. I was so calm. On the way to the hospital, I remember feeling so thankful that it didn’t get my eyes. I kept thinking that I must be going through this for a reason. And I thought “It’s okay, because I’m more than my face.”
That one line stuck with me forever, like a lightning bolt of truth that struck me. It’s still part of how I feel about myself today. I am so much more than my face. It’s funny that it took bacon grease to teach me that. All my life, growing up with these beautiful women around me, all I wanted was to be as beautiful as they were. And here I am in the freak accident moment, where my face may be scarred forever, and all I can think is that I’m so glad I’m more than my face.
I was waiting for God to change me into “beautiful” but he changed me into more than that. Sometimes God really knows what he’s doing. In this lesson, he also showed me the truth. That’s the most powerful thing about it all. I always wanted to feel like I was more than my face, but I didn’t know I was. By going through this, I became aware of how true it was.
We Are All More Than Our Faces
Even as my healing got uglier, which it did. I still kept feeling okay about myself. And that’s a pretty big deal given how burns have such a fun way of healing. They start to scab like normal wounds but they also weep. It looked like my face was melting.
It didn’t get me down. Instead, it kind of made me happy. It was so weird. All those years of striving to be pretty, and now I was walking around looking like a half-melted candlestick. There was no pressure anymore. I looked awful but I felt great.
When I’d go to my doctor’s appointments I’d walk in with my head held high. I’d smile at the people I passed. People who would stare at my wounds. I didn’t blame them for staring. I looked like something out of a horror film. I would have had the same reaction.
And that’s something else this experience gave me. It gave me perspective on what it feels like to be different. What it feels like to be disfigured, even just for a while. I won’t say I know what that’s like for everyone. There are people with much worse injuries or deformities. But I got a glimpse into what that was like.
Before I could blend in, but now I stood out, and not for a “good” reason. That was interesting to me. I could see how it can be painful to people. To be looked at with no admiration but with horror or curiosity.
It feels cruel but we have to remember it’s natural to stare at what’s different. We all spend so much time trying to conform, it would be weird if we didn’t notice someone who was different.
You learn a lot about other people in that situation too, based on how they react to you or treat you. You notice who meets your eye and who doesn’t, who’s kind and who’s avoidant. In a way, I bet people with deformities can tell what kind of person you are faster than the rest of us. Because you’re not trying to prove anything to them. Beauty = Value. So they don’t have to put on a show for someone they deem to have little value.
I find that both sad and incredibly interesting. The same thing happens to old people too. We forget they’re alive. They’re treated as though they aren’t people. We forget they’ve had full lives bursting with experiences.
We should value older people. And now that I’m thinking about it, use them as our spies. They can tell us who sucks as a human based on how they treat them.
All in all, I’m not worried I’ll be too tied to my looks anymore because this experience showed me I don’t have to be. I can see that getting older, or not being beautiful isn’t so bad. It can actually come with some perks. This experience set me free.
We all get old and wrinkly… if we’re lucky.
We aren’t the wrapping paper. We’re the gift.
My mom didn’t know that. And I see so many people in the world that don’t realize it. But it’s true. You’re the gift. If this post gives you anything at all, I hope it gives you even a glimpse of that.
You’re the gift if you have scars, if you get old, and if you’re wrapping paper is ugly or torn. You’re the gift. Everyone has a temporary package that looks different.
Maybe the journey you’re on requires a beautiful package so you can learn something specific from that viewpoint. Or maybe the journey you’re on requires you to be disfigured for you to learn what you came here to learn. We can’t change what is, short of surgery I guess.
My advice then, is to embrace who you are. This is your face, you might as well get used to it. And while you’re at it, try to love it. I know that sounds corny. I can’t help it.
I was lucky enough not to be scarred from this incident. My skin healed and looks like nothing ever happened. But while nothing noticeable happened on the outside, a lot happened within. I’m changed forever now. That burn happened almost a decade ago. And I’m still changed because of it.
I learned some powerful lessons. I know there are people out there who have gone through much worse. If you’re one of them I hope you know you’re more than your face too. I hope you feel that when you look in the mirror. And I hope you smile at the people who stare.
As you get older, or if you’re dealing with some accident that’s changed you, I hope you know you’re so much more than what’s on the outside. Don’t forget all the good stuff that’s on the inside.
Each and every one of us is more than our faces. The world can try to tell you otherwise, but that doesn’t make it true. If you let it, the world can fool you into thinking you aren’t enough. It can fool you into thinking that outer shell is what’s important. But I hope you’ll know better. You are so special.
You are exactly who and how you should be. You are having a unique experience for reasons unique to you. Not pretty, not ugly, just a candle holder for the flame that lives within.
You are more than your face.
If you want to check out the Podcast I co-host, go here:
Growing Up for Adults on Spotify
For my favorite books, and health and wellness products, go here:
And check out the books I authored here:
How to Be Friends with Your Ex
Thanks so much for reading today. I love you and want all the best for you.
