In our culture, we emphasize physical beauty. It gains privilege; it attracts attention, and at first glance, it’s exalted above the person who lives behind it.

It’s silly to me that we esteem something so temporary.

Our faces are all going to sport wrinkles one day, and when our life has passed, our bodies will be nothing but a bag of bones. We’ll all look the same.

But beauty is powerful, and we exalt it because of the way it moves our souls.

Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School who has conducted research on the perception of beauty, states, “Beauty draws us in. We can’t stop looking or listening or touching. It takes us outside ourselves and it motivates us. It’s essential to life and to happiness.”

I think we can all agree that beauty is “essential to life and happiness.”

But that begs the question, “What is beauty?”

Is it what the magazines promote, or is it much deeper and more inclusive than we realize?

Beauty, by its definition, is the quality about us that gives pleasure to the people around us, but the key is that it is in truthfulness and originality that we express it best.

The measure of beauty that you carry is in direct proportion with how truthfully you are yourself, and how boldly you express that.

You’re beautiful when you’re you, because the combination of who you are is distinctly original. When you’re truthful about who that is, your originality creates beauty.

The way we look is inflicted by blemishes, weight, health issues, even by the amount of sleep we get, and the list goes on and on.

You will never be able to meet a certain standard of physical beauty every day of your life; nature does not permit it.

But nature cannot define how you think, what you believe or your likes and dislikes. These things, though they will grow and develop, are not temporary.

Be truthful about who you are, in body and heart. Take pleasure in your physical form though it’s “imperfect.”

Take pleasure in the kinks and bends of your personality, though they may not fit into a social box.

Let’s embrace who we are and let the world see what it’s never seen, something original, something real.