The Vessel of Presence

I think, maybe, the least profitable trade is gratitude.

It’s a self defeating business, really. The more success you have at proliferating the product of appreciating what you have, the less people will need. Of everything.

It isn’t gratitude for my home that draws me to perfectly styled store windows depicting that elusive air of unstudied domestic elegance.

It isn’t gratitude for my family that compels me to share a picture-perfect (and possibly expensive) memory in the making, even while the memory has yet to exist.

It isn’t gratitude for the beauty of this planet that tempts me to become a consumer of travel, eating up and digesting each new place I visit.

And it most certainly isn’t gratitude for my own skin that has me spending cash on a slimming swimsuit or magic mascara.

When I feel unsatisfied with the skin I’m in, with the body I have been given, I am vulnerable. When I believe I am not beautiful enough, I can be manipulated by those who would sell me a version of myself they want me to want.

When I feel thrilled with my own beauty, I am also vulnerable. When I believe that my beauty deserves my adoration and yours, I can be manipulated by those who would sell me a version of myself they want me to want.

If I can practice gratitude for the skin I am in, I might find myself floating above the categories of beautiful or less than beautiful.

Internalizing this is transformative. Why, then, are we not saturated with messages of body neutrality the way we are with other body messaging?

Perhaps a better question might be, who can turn a profit on gratitude?

We are taught to be actively dissatisfied with the body we are in, but we are also told that to feel anything less then self-actualized satisfaction is yet another personal failure. These are two faces of the same coin, vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

Women especially are subject to this, very often evaluated as an aesthetic form before they are honored as a created being. Even as a woman who has had to reckon with this and struggle to come to my own peace, I acknowledge that body neutrality for someone who looks like me has the potential to be a much easier battle to win. This is not because the skin and bones I was created to inhabit is better or easier, but because the world tends to treat it as neutral, unremarkable, and unoffensive. I am not constantly fighting negative or positive messages from the world about my particular form. When I was very young, I used to pray prayers of gratitude to God for my utter averageness. Blessed are the bland, for the world will treat them neutrally.

This is not everyone’s lived experience.

Even in acknowledging this, I still believe that gratitude has the power to lift. It can shift power away from the world’s categories and into the wonder of being alive and here.

I am grateful for this body, for this skin, not because of the way others perceive them as an aesthetic object, but because they are what allows me to be present in the world.

My body is the vessel of my presence.

I may feel beautiful, I may not. The world may see me as beautiful, it may not. This will shift from minute to minute. Regardless, I am here, in this very particular minute, because my body was created to be here.

Being fearfully and wonderfully made is not about being beautiful.

It is just about being made.

Buy the swimsuit if you like, wear the mascara…or not. Do what you do as an extension of being present in the world, as a way of showing up, and as a way of displaying a deep gratitude for the chance to do so.

Thank you to Ally Tran for inspiring me to share my thinking in this post.