I'm so sick of pretty

I want something true, don't you?

Somewhere around 8th grade I dipped my toe into the world of blogging. Nothing fancy, existential poetry, dramatic prose. Exactly the stereotypical garbage you’re imagining. It was fun. It was free. It could be private or very public. But in my own little blog-o-sphere everything was up to me. The sensation of being in a wide open space to explore oneself, ones world, and ones imagination. Possibility abounding.

Consumption core, commercialization of creativity, the transfer of life from being shared online to being lived online. I was too young to pay attention to what came first and too unsuspecting to have noticed it’s effects but somewhere along the line I stopped writing. Archived the blogs. Cut back on my creative sharing. Instead I turned to sharing quotes and quips, memes and videos.

The details change through the years but the idea is the same - I stopped making and confined myself to two simple activities - consumption and regurgitation. Sharing is the new language of the internet. Creation is shared for those whose job it is to create- designers, writers, and influencers create. The rest of us? Me? I just receive, repost, repeat.

In Encanto my least favorite character is Isabella. She is self absorbed and conceited. Even when she makes confessions about how much pressure she’s under it still feels like it comes with a side dish of “if I wasn’t so amazing my life wouldn’t be so hard.” But there are two lines in her song (the titular lines of this post) that catch me every time. They snag on a crack in the shield from behind which I judge her for her perfectionism and conceit.

“I’m so sick of pretty.” I really, really am. Curated, curated, curated. My life, my world, my social places. Filtered by computers to make it more visually appealing. So that one ought never to have to see anything that isn’t at the very center of the niche they have been cattle herded into. Typed and subtyped we are sorted onto our little conveyer belts where we are entertained to death with things that fit within the narrow window of our selected interests. And it’s all just so beautiful.

In a glossy, plastic, new toy sort of way.

You know what I’m talking about. If you ever received a new toy, gifted a new toy, or knew a child who was gifted a new toy then you’ve seen it. This is one of the most mundane facts of life - toys do not weather regular life well. Baby dolls after a few months of little child lovin look like they’ve been to war. What was once shiny, clean, and colorful is quickly scratched, grungy, and faded.

Pretty doesn’t hold up to life well. Pretty can’t be lived in. The rough edges of your humanity rip through the fabric of pretty. You need something thicker, tougher, lovelier in its own right.

I always told people I stopped writing because I stopped knowing what to write. Sometimes I would also blame time. Time an easy culprit.

I stopped writing because I didn’t know how to write pretty enough. How to be me with out being something more. I’m not eloquent enough to be a writer of poetic prose. But I’m not grungy enough to write those cold, hard opinion pieces I’ve always loved. My most raw doesn’t look cool or collected. It doesn’t look disheveled and chaotic (but always somehow in a hot way?).

I tried on a thousand personalities through writing but since none of them were me I could never really get in them enough to be convincing. So in frustration I threw down my pen, a cry of “never enough!” barely held back from escaping my lips. Because who or what isn’t enough? Myself? My craft? And enough for whom? The world? The reader? Just me?

Don’t tell me to be myself and dance like no ones watching. Someone had better be watching. That’s the whole point - at least that has become the whole point. Social media, blogs, marketing, websites, youtube. It’s to get yourself out there - to be seen!

In and of itself the desire to share yourself with others is human and holy and lovely. So of course, it is here we find the root of the vine of commercialism. Here is where it started and then trailed its leaves and tendrils around every facet of our society. Why? Because true intimacy - the sharing of self and truth and real tangible life can’t be sold or patented or gatekept. But it is a deep hunger for those that lack it.

That deep hunger we feel to know and be known. To speak words that are true and to create art that is human and to be imperfect and textured and aging and real -ly beautiful. The seeds of profit have been planted into our open arms, exposed heart. And once the seed has sprouted it kills whatever it doesn’t deem pretty - whatever doesn’t feed and nurture itself.

Some vines are so invasive that the only way to kill them is to burn the field. I don’t know the answers to our cultural obsession with plastic perfection and profit at the cost of people. But I have found a little space where the dirt is freshly turned and there is room for my daisies and ferns. So I plant them here. They’re not roses or peonies. They’re simple forest flora. But they’re real and true. And just like that I am writing again. I am walking around in your gardens and seeing for the first time in a long time something other than that one giant vine with its cookie cutter leaves.