Making peace with the parts of myself and my past beyond my control is a strange process.

The way I approach it is comparable to gingerly unfolding an intricate work of origami and trying to trace and understand why the paper bends this way instead of that, how the folds were made, why certain lines are more pronounced than others — all before I have actually seen what the final product was. How do you unfold and fold something at the same time, without the paper breaking and without losing your mind?

Well, you learn what parts of the paper actually needs that unfolding, which does not, and what to fold and what to leave alone.

And, quite frankly? I realized that I actually care about how beautiful I look.

The fact that this desire has been with me my entire conscious life does not make it any less “cringe”; nor does confessing that recent compliments have been getting to my head make me sound more humble; nor does explaining how I want to shape what nature has given me grant me pardon for this gentle defiance in the light of what every good, modest Christian girl memorized in Sunday school — “favor is deceitful and beauty is vain.”

Growing up with an overflowing handful of sisters meant you would inevitably match each other against the four girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. By birth order, personality, ambitions, and temperament, I am Josephine — so much so that I still sign my name with a J at the end of my name (instead of C) as a nod to her. All the girls were pretty in their own right, but in my memory one scene in the novel stands alone: After Jo cuts her hair and sells it for her father’s sake, the depth of Jo’s awareness of her own beauty and desire to maintain it is revealed. She sobs quietly at night over the loss of her greatest asset — her glorious head of hair, her shining mane, her one claim to gorgeousness.

When that scene engraved itself onto my mind, I started noticing how I was wearing my mane, what other girls did to their hair, and whether I could do something to make it look nice. This phase did not last long — I was too in love with how the wind feels as it blows through my hair and how practical ponytails were that all I did (and still do) was either have my hair down or up in a ponytail. Sometimes I would put on a headscarf as a compromise, but that was it.

I was in my mid-teens when I came across the second bit of thought that made me care, once again, about what I looked like. I forget in which novel it was in — Grace Livingston Hill wrote many — but in one of her description of a girl was this line (paraphrased): “She had the eyes of one who saw birds and flowers and little creatures, and loved them.” I read that once, twice, thrice before I read the rest of the page. I wanted eyes like that, I told myself. But what do such eyes look like? What makes them different from the eyes of someone who sees only loss and profit, or takes in only what they can understand and grasp and control? How do I develop such eyes as hers — do I earn and maintain them over time, or are people born with the look in their eyes already determined?

Staring at birds and dandelion throughout summer got me closer, but it did not quite give me those eyes. (Still not sure if I have them yet.) But it did teach me to observe without prejudiced judgement, to appreciate beauty without demanding a quantifiable profit from the moment, to feel emotions thoroughly on their timeline instead of an arbitrary schedule. This whole “look of the eyes” ideal morphed from wanting to look like someone who does that thing to becoming someone with a heart that does the thing instinctively.

So — glorious hair and pretty eyes. Those were my beauty goals.

There was a brief stint in my late teens when I experimented with makeup, but it did not last long: good quality, health-conscious products were expensive, the process of painting up one’s imperfections took too much time, and I just simply did not care enough. I wanted to cry when I felt like crying and not have to hold it in because my mascara would run in public; I wanted to eat without contorting my lips into exaggerated shapes; I liked to feel fresh-faced and ready for anything, without having to preserve a “look.” It simply was not worth the trouble.

Then came the inward years where I dove deep into personal development, religious beliefs, and the measure and definition of a “self.” What I looked like did not matter as much then — it was who I am on the inside that counts, it was how much I was healing, how honest and first-person-style I was willing to go in this endeavor called Life. Being presentable was enough for this version of me. Clean clothes, clean smell (if any smell at all), clean overall look. No one cared, much less myself. On different days I would feel confident, scared, energetic tired, unsure, struggling; but never ugly nor beautiful.

And then one day, I did.

It feels weird writing this out (partly due to how recent these experiences were), but suffer me to attempt to do so.

There is a different between waking up and feeling ready to take on the world, and waking up and feeling beautiful and powerful. Something like the difference between bareknuckling your way through a problem versus grooving to music while you’re at it. The “powerful” isn’t necessarily about being strong and conquering the external world either — it’s the confidence that nothing can make you love yourself any less, that there is no reason to compare yourself to others, that there is nothing but being you and experiencing this reality as yourself — and accepting that that is beautiful.

People pick up on that.

Granted, this is after ensuring the building blocks of health are in place — where your sleep, diet, mental life, and emotional regulation come together. But still, I did not change that much. I didn’t do stuff to make myself look pretty. I just…lived.

The line that gave birth to this post is what Leonard Cohen said as he described Joni Mitchell. “Something about her face was carved.”

Not in the sense of have a chiseled look, or a sharp jawline, but in the sense that it was crafted with thought and intention. She had the face she was born with, sure; but something of that face was her very own — of the way her story molded her, of the parts of her life that both clarified and took away from who she once was. The comment makes me wonder anew — do we get to chose how to carve our faces?

We might not be able to dictate what we go through; but more often than not, we can determine what they mean to us and how deeply they affect and change us. We could also choose to experience certain stories and not others; we can take risks, or ignore them; we could choose to stare down fears or hide from them.

These things change what we look like, deliberately, over time. We do carve our faces.

How much you take responsibility for how you live more or less determines how much YOU do the carving of your looks.

Character. Integrity. Clarity. The decisions you make and the reasons you give for them.

Closing thought? Your face is not just a face. It is a story.