Scars (or On Being Beautiful)

There's this pop song by Alessia Cara called "Scars to Your Beautiful," and just about every time I hear it I get teary eyed. I guess if you're jaded enough, the lyrics seem at first glance trite. She talks about how beautiful "you" are and how you don't have to change anything, so maybe it's a good message even if it's hard to take seriously in a pop song. After all, there are so many of these out in the world-- from the self-acceptance in Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" to Daya's song of self-empowerment, "Sit Still, Look Pretty." Why does "Scars to Your Beautiful" do me in?

First, if this song appeals to teeny boppers, then it also appeals to the teeny bopper in me. Or at least the teenager that I once was with all my insecurities and social pinings. If only I could be thinner, prettier, more talented, less awkward then I wouldn't feel so lonely. But being an insecure and somewhat outgoing young woman meant that I had to hide those self-doubts behind a wall of carefree attitude.

In the second verse of Cara's song, she sings:

She has dreams to be an envy, so she's starving
You know, covergirls eat nothing
She says beauty is pain and there's beauty in everything
What's a little bit of hunger?
I can go a little while longer
She fades away

And that's about where I start to get all choked up. Because while I don't remember consciously thinking these things, I did this post-high school. I starved myself. I remember telling my brother this was my weight-loss method, and he scolded me and I shrugged him off because of course he was right and I didn't care.

And I'm not saying that this is how every young woman feels or that my experience is representative of everyone's. I'm not even saying that only women go through this. This is me working through the lyrics. Because Cara goes on in that second verse:

"She don't see her perfect, she don't understand she's worth it
Or that beauty goes deeper than the surface"

I've got tears in my eyes at this point, and it's also the tricky part. Even as a teenager, I knew that "beauty goes deeper," but it did't mean much because no one else seemed to care. I knew I was unique and a great person to know. I was a lot of fun. I was down for adventure and meeting new people. I was a good person, and yet I still felt so ugly all the time, which also meant (and this is the really embarrassing part to admit) that I cared a lot (too much) about what boys thought. Laughably, I thought that any boy who liked me HAD to be special to see through all this external ugliness.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to realize what a crock it all was. And honestly the growth didn't come from a song like "Scars to Your Beautiful," though music did play a huge role. Everclear's Sparkle and Fade album kicked my butt (which is kind of shameful in its own way), as did the Judybats' Pain Makes You Beautiful. But I credit Green Day's "She" for really breaking me out of my own mind with their lyric, "She's figured out all her doubts were someone else's point of view." <enter mind blowing explosion sounds here>

So if you see me getting simultaneously teary eyed and stoic when Alessia Cara's "Scars to Your Beautiful" comes on, now you know why.

My tenth grade self