I am beautiful.

Not seamlessly, not easily, but in a way that has been questioned and wrangled with and turned over and held intimately.

We have to know ourselves before we can know ourselves to be beautiful.

We have to feel pain and heartbreak and rejection.

We have to not rush to heal those wounds, but seek to understand them.

We have to see that they’ve made us richer.

We have to feel the abundance created through the aftermath of hurt.

Beauty isn’t something bestowed upon us.

It isn’t applied layer upon layer.

Beauty is the accumulation of gratitude. It is the slow trickle of self-worth gathered patiently over the construction of our own narratives.

It is the wild irreverence of being in partnership with our bodies.

It is the sometimes lonely and always courageous drawing of our own outlines.

It is not in the understanding of who we are—but in the open curiosity of who we can be.

Beauty lies nestled in the truth of the cliche that it lies on the inside—it does.

And it will stay there. Buried deeply, impenetrable and obscured, until we do the painful and glorious work of exposing it.

So, start.

Do the work. Love recklessly. Get heartbroken.

Rage at your body. Forgive it.

And then forgive yourself.

Stop making the wondrous contradictions of your life wrong—polish them instead, for it is their many facets that will make you shimmer.

Chip away at it, my gorgeous human.

The work of beauty is what this life is made for.

Author: Maddie Berky

Image: Sarick Banana/Deviantart

Editor: Renée Picard