There is something uncanny about people who expect perfectionism in appearance

 

I've had more or less unsupervised access to the internet for the last nine or ten years, which means I have spent a significant portion of my life observing people talk about other people. What they like. What they don't. What they find attractive. What they would never tolerate. And if you ask most people what they want in a partner, the answers sound reasonable enough. They'll mention kindness, humour, intelligence, emotional maturity. They'll talk about chemistry and compatibility and shared values.

Then, somewhere in the middle of the conversation, a stretch mark appears and suddenly everybody loses their mind.

Or acne.

Or body hair.

Or cellulite.

Or pores.

Or the fact that human skin, when viewed from less than six inches away, looks like human skin.

And I always find myself wondering the same thing.

When was the last time a normal person didn't have these things?

When they were a child.

When was the last time you had no body hair?

When you were a child.

When was the last time your skin was completely smooth, untouched, unchanging, almost unreal?

When you were a child.

And somehow we have built beauty standards around the absence of adulthood while simultaneously expecting people to be adults.

That contradiction sits strangely with me.

I think people hear the word "pedophilia" and immediately imagine only its most extreme and obvious forms, but there is a quieter version woven into culture that nobody wants to talk about. Not attraction to children themselves, but the strange glorification of childlike traits in grown adults. The obsession with youth pushed so far that adulthood itself starts being treated like a defect.

A grown woman is expected to have the emotional intelligence of an adult, the responsibilities of an adult, the experiences of an adult, but her body must somehow remain untouched by the evidence of having lived.

As though growing up is acceptable only if nobody can see it.

And maybe that's what unsettles me.

Not body hair.

Not cellulite.

Not stretch marks.

The expectation that their absence is somehow more natural.

Because if there is one thing I have learned from looking at nature, it is that nature absolutely adores evidence.

Trees keep score.

Mountains keep score.

Rivers keep score.

Everything carries marks of where it has been.

A cliff face records every storm it has survived. A tree trunk records every year it has lived through. The moon itself is covered in scars from collisions that happened before any of us existed.

Nothing in nature remains untouched.

Why should people?

As we grow older, our bodies begin to imitate the world around us in ways I find oddly beautiful. Stretch marks branch across skin like pale lightning trapped in a summer sky. Bruises look like the galaxy. Cellulite gathers in soft hills and valleys. Freckles arrive like constellations. Scars settle into the body the way rivers settle into landscapes.

I know that sounds terribly sentimental, but sometimes I genuinely think human beings spend their entire lives slowly turning into pieces of nature.

And then we are taught to apologise for it.

To shave it.

To laser it.

To conceal it.

To blur it.

To edit it away.

As though the highest form of beauty is looking less alive.

The older I get, the less impressed I am by perfection. Perfection feels sterile. It feels like a museum replica of something rather than the thing itself. A plastic flower can be flawless, but I would still rather have the real one, even if its petals are uneven and a little weather-beaten.

Because reality has texture.

Reality leaves traces.

Reality changes.

And perhaps what I find most uncanny of all is not the existence of these so-called imperfections, but the fact that we've convinced ourselves they are imperfections in the first place.

A body that grows hair is doing what bodies do.

A body that changes shape is doing what bodies do.

A body that carries marks from growth, time, stress, sunlight, weight fluctuations, healing, and living is doing exactly what bodies have always done.

The strange thing is not that people look human.

The strange thing is that we've started expecting them not to.

A stretch mark is not a flaw.

Body hair is not a flaw.

Cellulite is not a flaw.

The flaw is looking at a grown human being and feeling disappointed that they look grown.