This is a eulogy. A eulogy for all the women who died a premature death. It’s to honor and remember all the women who were tortured, killed and taken before it was their time.
Wanna know how they died? Care to hear exactly how they became ghosts in bodies of defeated women?
For years, they were beat against airbrushed models and under-fed actresses selling coconut water. They were slashed with waistlines, heights and cup sizes.
They were thrown into scorching pits of tiny waists, long legs, voluptuous curves and shaped behinds.
They were burned, marred and violated, until they lost all their self-worth and ability to remember who they were and what they wanted. They were cast in a mold, made sure to know exactly how low they fell on the totem pole of looks.
Then that pole was harnessed to their backs, and they were forced to carry it day after day.
The pole whispered to them. It spoke to them at night and in line at the store. It reminded them to never forget.
To never forget where their beauty stood. To never forget that looks are the most important thing. They are your livelihood, your security, your purpose for being.
They are the only ways you will get a man and earn your keep; they solidify your existence.
Day after day, the pole got heavier, the load a bit more unbearable. It began whispering louder. It began yelling, ranting and eventually it broke them under the unbearable load, letting out a final blow: Your looks are fading.
Yep, the looks they’d been attached to their whole lives were changing. They saw their last moments, sitting there, in front of them, the way a prisoner sees his final days.
They realized they would eventually lose the only thing that gave them meaning for so long. That once their looks fade, they had nothing else.
They drowned in the sea of plump lips and fake boobs. They died in salons, surgery rooms and overpriced salons. They died a slow and painful death, always comparing themselves, always losing the race.
Because what’s the point of living if you’re ugly? What’s the point of going on if you’re no longer beautiful and desirable? What’s the point to life without your looks?
For all those who can still be saved, I’ll tell you the point.
The point is to f*cking live. To reject the psychological interference that’s been suppressing you. It's to defy the stigma that you are nothing more than something to look at.
It's to engulf souls with passion and intelligence, to win over hearts with brilliance and integrity. It's to be so beautiful that people don't even remember what your face looks like.
The point is to refuse the standards and the oppression and find your worth outside of the drawers they’ve tried to lock it in. The point is to get over the “pretty hump” to greener pastures, where you stop caring about looks, and finally let yourself free.
The point is to find something more important to you than a pretty face and good body. Because those things are not stable. Those things will not always be there for you.
You must do this for the benefit of your own survival. You must do it to honor your sisters who died trying to hold on to that intangible idea of self-worth.
You must do it before you waste your life, stressed and miserable, because you don’t look like Angelina Jolie. You must do this because there's more important things than your looks.
If you don’t stop caring about your looks, if you don’t remind yourself that your body is simply a vessel for your soul, then you too, will die before you stop breathing.
Worrying about your age makes you age
Stress lines are not something your mother made up to keep you from frowning at family dinners. Unfortunately, they are very real.
The negative emotions we hold inside eventually manifest themselves on our youthful faces. Yet, this stress causes much more severe damage than just wrinkles and crows feet.
According to Dr. Vivian Diller, PhD in an article with Huffington Post,
When we’re under ongoing stress, it creates that fight-or-flight reaction in an unrelenting way, and as a result, stress chemicals are released into the body. What we know so far is that the release of those stress chemicals creates biological changes. It’s very possible that if you have a life filled with that constant stress, little by little the body is breaking down.
If stress makes the body age faster, and worrying about your looks makes you stress, wouldn’t you say that your looks are inadvertently killing you?
Society is killing us through making us pretty
Cosmetic surgery is a choice, yet at the rate Americans undergo it, you’d think it a demand. According to Lynn Sherr of ABC News, “9 million Americans had some part of their body lifted, plumped, reshaped, tucked or peeled last year.”
And while only 36 people in Florida (a popular state for cosmetic surgeries) are reported to have died undergoing cosmetic surgery since 1997, that’s 36 too many.
However, the most surprising statistic to come out of cosmetic surgery studies is that women who underwent breast augmentation were three times more likely to commit suicide than women who did not have the surgery.
Such a sad fact proves that beauty -- and happiness -- cannot be bought.
According to the study, the surgeries themselves do not have any direct linkage to the death of the women, but rather that the women undergoing the surgeries have more psychiatric problems than those refusing it.
Could there be a link between the desire to be beautiful and psychiatric problems?
I think it's fair to say that those who spend their lives worrying about their looks develop certain neuroses and phobias that women who don't think twice about how they look will never know. Maybe beauty and insanity do go hand-in-hand.
Unhappiness kills faster than old age
We will never be that most beautiful selves we always imagined. We will never be flawless nor perfect.
We are who we are, and whether that face is defined as beautiful, average, pretty, ugly or cute, it’s never going to bring you true happiness.
Because even the most beautiful faces carry unhappiness. Even the most gorgeous women compare themselves, worry about their worth and watch their beauty age and change.
According to a study on mindset and healthy hearts by MSN, negative emotions have been proven to be “cardio toxic” or poisonous to your heart.
Stress, anxiety, rage and grief are all examples of the kind of emotions that lead to premature heart attacks and disease.
According to Mladen Golubic, MD, PhD,
When you're feeling hostile, your autonomic nervous system goes into overdrive. Your system is flooded with stress hormones, and if it happens often enough, those hormones can actually change the physiology of your heart.
They say it's possible to die of a broken heart, however, it's even more possible to die of a vain one.
