Tragic

Awoman died after a botched cosmetic procedure in an obscure clinic last week. That she went to such a place tells us she didn’t have the funds to go to a more reputable one, which further tells us that even if she didn’t have enough, she spent what she had to enhance her breasts and buttocks. It was that important to her. Did she do it out of sheer vanity or did she do it because it was going to increase her chances of getting a job that she felt would improve her life? We will never know.

I carry a growing concern about our increasing fixation on changing our bodies. You see it in the giant billboards: skin whitening, cellulite removal, body sculpting, laser this and that, etc., etc. I would be a hypocrite if I said I never went for it. For my face, I had little, recurring wart-like growths removed twice. But the treatments were about 16 years apart. For my body, I waited for a promo rate and dove in for a non-invasive massage treatment which did very little to change my shape permanently. It serves me right. I spent money on such a silly thing for the sake of vanity. It still makes me cringe. You see the ads often enough and, like they intend, you start to think you need it. Never again. I’ve gone back to exercising, eating right most of the time and accepting who I am. Now that’s something we all need to learn. It’s not easy, especially while Angelina Jolie lives, but we have to make an effort because the healthy sense-of-self of future generations depends on the grounded and wholehearted acceptance of our God-given bodies today.

Honestly, I’ve never seen a nose job do justice to any face. There’s always something a bit off about faces and bodies that have been reconstructed. I saw an odd body in the Sunday market once. My eyes were drawn to it because it was poured into festive lycra, but also because the proportions seemed forced and unnatural. The buttocks were so lifted that they seemed to hang in the air by themselves. The breasts were a smaller (but not much) version of the buttocks, and suffered from the same gravity-defying phenomenon. The arms were puckered in specific places, rather than naturally toned. Then the lady turned to reveal the same unusual constellation happening on her face. Her cheeks kept her smile from expanding. Her eyes were too stretched. It was almost as if one procedure tried to correct another until she looked like a shadow of her former human face: imperfect, yes, but infinitely more human and, therefore, more beautiful than this patchwork result of cosmetic surgery.

It will take time, but we have to learn that the bodies we come with are a gift no matter the shape and, if we gain weight or develop saddlebags, cellulite, facial hair, post-baby fat or any other perceived imperfections, the best kind of healing and restoration will only come from our own inner strivings: eating the right food for optimum nourishment, exercising moderately for health, strength and enjoyment, thinking positively, engaging in work that is meaningful to us and relevant in the world, and accepting who we are and embracing age as an important life process.

A dear friend recently asked if I regret turning 40. I had to laugh because when it comes to age, there are no choices. You can fight it all you want but there you are. I don’t really know if regret would serve me. Or maybe it was a polite way of asking if I felt terrible about aging. Maybe more to the point, if I’m afraid my looks are fading. Not really. My metabolism has definitely slowed down and I am not as lean as before. It takes extra effort to keep my weight the way it was and I am learning to love the two bumps of flesh that have mysteriously sprouted on my sides. (Well, at least I can hang on to them when I am tired and have to climb steep inclines.) I am developing lines on my face and I simply do not have the same energy as before. I am not the same. But that is good.

Turning 40 has been a grace. Life is truly beginning. My thirties were the most difficult years. But towards the end of that decade, I felt as though my true self had birthed from all my inner suffering. I now have a glimmer of recognition of my true purpose as a Filipino and a human being. That put everything in perspective. Something has opened up inside me that was not there before. After years of emotional struggle, there I was — imperfect as ever — but with a better sense of who I really am. And that self sees beauty very differently. Yes, my physical body is definitely aging but something far greater is blossoming.

I see photographs of old, wrinkled women and find them so beautiful because I feel I can read their life stories. I resonate with them. There is such profound beauty in that. You can look at a face and tell if a person has met life with grace or bitterness. It really does show and if we start fiddling with our appearance, all that goes away and the outer no longer reflects the inner. And that’s why there is such dissonance in the appearance of people who keep going for cosmetic surgery. The physical truth is altered. That is very serious. That’s why deaths from cosmetic surgery are so difficult to understand. I always feel someone so inwardly lost died for something so inconsequential. Enhanced breasts and buttocks? What life is worth that?

We are growing old in a culture that labels everything imperfect — including our human forms. That we think cosmetic surgery and other modern beauty treatments are superior to Divine creation is truly alarming. We look at our bodies and think it perfectly okay to infuse them with possibly carcinogenic chemicals, slice here, plump up there, and God-knows-what elsewhere, all in the name of vanity. It is so sad. We treat aging as a disease. I’ve heard men talk about women past their twenties, as if they were useless slabs of meat: tsk, tsk, pare, nanganak na. Our bodies have brought life into the world, yet some Neanderthals fail to see the supreme gift in that.

We have bought into the lie that what we have is not enough; we are not enough. We are a most religious culture and yet we have become so materialistic, even in the way we view ourselves. The great disconnect is glaring. We hear Mass regularly but we do everything to dishonor our bodies, all in the name of a severely flawed and empty idea of beauty. Tragic doesn’t even begin to name it.

The way we look outside has everything to do with who we are inside, too. Our outer body tells the story of our inner life. Though I understand the feeling of being physically not up to par even with one’s own standards of beauty (who doesn’t these days?), we really must hold to truths we know deep inside. Physical beauty isn’t everything. We keep saying it but when are we going to believe it?

A life lived with love and grace creates more beauty than any chemical or medical procedure ever invented. Put a too-perfect woman in her twenties beside a mature woman in her forties who has been to hell and back, and still laughs at the telling, and I would still find the latter more beautiful. She understands what it is to be human. Life and everything about it — including aging and imperfection — is a most precious gift. It’s time we learn to respect it.

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