The Search For Beauty

by Michelle Wu

I remember the time when the most magical part of every day was waking up early in the morning with no clue of what would happen later in the day. Before my internal clock reached puberty and got all fucked up, I would be up at 7 AM—even on weekends and holidays, much to the dismay and exhaustion of my parents—ready for the adventure that awaited me. What made every single day so goshdarn beautiful back then?

Perhaps it was the promise that there was going to be something that I had never experienced before since there were fewer days to compare the new ones to. Some of the loveliest things from my childhood were my old textbooks and notebooks covered with my doodles, my ratchet rock collection, worms, and flowers.

I remember when I was much younger, around seven years old, I had an empty egg carton filled with the rocks that I collected while on walks or hikes with my family. The yellow foam of the egg carton was scratched up and dirty from the growing collection of rocks, but I wouldn’t let my parents throw it out and replace it. Sure, I loved my smooth “egg rock” and the large lumpy one with crystals embedded in it, but I thought that the carton made the collection stunning. Was it objectively beautiful for anyone else seeing it? Probably not. My parents hated the carton with a burning passion. I guess the beat-up sides and the broken lid didn’t fit the cleanliness of the house. But for me, the beauty was derived from the satisfaction of seeing how well-loved the carton looked.

My notebooks were well-loved with my bored, daydreaming mind scribbling art everywhere. I thought it was so beautiful to revisit later, even though it was a mess of spirals and eyes and intricate flowers. And bugs. I hate bugs now, but I used to think their colorful bodies and thin, crooked legs made them look so delicate. I thought worms were beautiful because they were squishy and fun to play with. Dandelions were my favorite flowers. I would always have to fight the urge to pick one that was bright yellow, just so I could impatiently wait until the end of the season to blow the fluffy white seeds into the air.

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; Ashining gloss that fadeth suddenly; Aflower that dies when first it ‘gins to bud; Abrittle that’s broken presently; Adoubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, Lost, vaded, broken, dead within an hour.

As people grow older the innocent beauty of everyday life fades into mundanity. But when does something lose its beauty? Is it when the excitement fades into normalcy? I don’t remember when, but I do know that one day, the new doodle in my notebook suddenly looked messy compared to the neat blue lines and the words kept strictly in between the margins. The doodle was no longer a beautiful product of my creative (and extremely distracted) mind. It became a blemish on the paper, and I stared at it until I decided to erase it from the page. This is still something I notice while in class. The habit of doodling when bored in class hasn’t disappeared, but the more I stare at the once-clean margins of my page, the more I feel an urge to remove it. The appreciation for

whatever my distant mind created in those moments is gone.

Similarly, when I was younger, each new rock, park, worm, whatever it was I encountered while outside playing or on walks was shiny and new. But after more than a decade of seeing rocks while walking, each new one doesn’t spark the same excitement that it once did. Maybe it’s not that the beauty of the world fades, but rather that we just develop an immunity to it.

If something is truly beautiful, can you actually become tired of it? Or “immune” to it? Does that become the new standard? Do you become restless for more? Or for something else? It seems that people constantly move on from one shiny trinket to the next.

The cycle of beauty reminds me of the news. Each headline is more shocking than the one before. Companies fight to sensationalize their stories, and the general public just becomes increasingly desensitized with each article. Desensitization occurs when an emotional response is

evoked so many times over that it becomes unnecessary to feel that emotion at all when regarding the stimulus. The diminished emotional responsiveness could be negative, positive, or aversive. Does the same thing happen with beauty?

This nagging question leads to fear. I am terrified of commitment to people, to places, and to things. Because what if my shiny qualities are diminished over time? Or even worse, what if I wake up one day and the beauty that I used to see is gone?

But what is beautiful now, if I’ve outgrown the beauty that comes with childhood innocence, where the world looks sweet and saturated with my rose-colored glasses? Is there beauty in pain? In defeat? In having those bad days? I find that as an adult, I can confidently say that there is beauty in all those aforementioned items. Pain, something that I would avoid at all costs as a child, I can now welcome with a hesitant embrace. Even when something hurts me, I know that I will heal and become that much stronger. And the depth of the pain only reflects how much I am able to feel and how vulnerable I can allow myself to be. Defeats. Rejections. There is always a sting when you see an email start off with “Unfortunately” or “We’re sorry to…”, but I find it beautiful that my triumphs and successes uplift me that much more. And having bad days. Oh, I remember how I would wish every day would be a good day. I even came up with a theory that if the day started out good, it would end badly and vice versa. But now I see it differently. Isn’t it pretty to know that if a day was bad, that you were able to get through it?

If you asked me if there is beauty in the chaos and messiness that I loved as a child, I would say there still is. But now there is beauty in the structure and schedules that I despised back then. This is probably because of the stress of the responsibilities that come with maturing. Suddenly you’re responsible for yourself in the world, and you don’t live in a small little bubble without many consequences. Even though we develop a fear of the unknown as we grow older, there is still beauty in trying new things as if we are forever young.

— Sigmund Freud