On Love and Beauty

December 20, 2025

Hi! I'm Ada, I love myself, and I say so freely and joyfully.

Bravely, too: I know how it sounds, how it might strike the ungenerous.

Thus not naively: I know how open it is to mockery.

The path to self-love was Beauty. I've been in love with Beauty my whole thinking life; no, longer: my whole reading life. My love was born as I read and reread to tatters L. M. Montgomery's Emily trilogy, which premises and articulates Beauty found in the natural disposition of the Earth and in writing. Montgomery is exquisitely alive to the beauty of the natural world and of poetry—and of the human form, particularly the feminine. You can see her love for female beauty in the way she describes Emily, with her slow-blossoming smile, her white skin, and her slender ankles.

Emily shaped me: the books made me long for Beauty. I had what Emily had: "the flash," she called it. I called it, each one, when I came have it and to put a name to it, a glimpse of the Divine. A climax of the soul. As I wouldn't read until some twenty years later, in Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis called it Joy:

I had become fond of Longfellow's Saga of King Olaf: fond of it in a casual, shallow way for its story and its vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from such pleasures, and like a voice from far more distant regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner's Drapa and read

I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead—

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, and pale, and remote) and then [...] found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.

Lewis's experience was appetitive; neither Emily's nor mine was. Those glimpses of mine were gifts, and they would never stop giving themselves to me. I knew it. (Spoiler alert: they stopped.) What I did long for with sick intensity and hideous appetite was something else, was female beauty: that is, my own. I wanted to be beautiful.

There is something uniquely horrible about the female desire for female beauty: to possess it for oneself. I'm not talking about lesbian desire, where the desired woman is the poem, say, and you're the reader or the poet. I'm talking about wanting to be the poem yourself. I'm talking about wanting to be adored, and worshipped, and—as a true poem never is—envied. A true poem is absolutely and finally itself. It can't be improved. It can't be paraphrased. "In the end," Ellen Kushner wrote in Swordspoint of the Faery Queen, "she made all others seem impossible." A beautiful woman—that is, the beautiful woman that the desiring woman wants to be—is replaceable. "I'd kill, to look like her," I thought through my younger years. The real willingness to commit homicide in order to be—say it: thin—was constant, but the woman envied was a parade of women envied.

Look: I've had the eating disorder.

But look, too: I beat the eating disorder.

Some women never do.

I beat the eating disorder, and that's how I can look in the mirror and not hate what I see. Just the opposite: I look in the mirror, and stun myself stupid with my own beauty.

I look in the mirror, and smile at my reflection, and say: "You're beautiful. Babygirl, you're beautiful."

And I believe it. I said it because I believed it.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I don't love myself because I'm beautiful.

I'm beautiful because I love myself.

Our thoughts shape our perceptions.

So why not think the thoughts that lead to empowering perceptions?

I lied: I love myself because I'm beautiful.

I love myself because I have a beautiful mind.

I learned my mind was beautiful when I started writing fiction.

I have so many parties to thank for getting me writing: Mo Xiang Tong Xiu and her legions of fans. The makers of The Untamed. The cast of The Untamed. Wang Zhuocheng in particular, for his impossible face.

harriet_vane, for writing The Simplest Way Forward, the story that got me to watch the series to start with.

Naomi Novik, for founding the Archive of Our Own, a treasure trove; and astolat, for creating so many stellar exemplars of this curious and wondrous genus fanfiction over the decades. She's an inspiration.

Foothill College, for surfacing a creative writing course online right when I was ready for it. The instructor of the course, for devising the prompt that got me writing the first sentence of Consequences. I kept writing.

My readers, whose comments encouraged me to keep on keeping on. ♡

Writing, for me, means crafting beautiful prose. Externalizing exquisite taste. Expressing fine wit.

Those elements are extra-narrative: they have to do with me, the author, and what I value and think I have to offer.

In-narrative, thematically: I write a totalitarian Lust.

Look: I'm an acolyte. I was born a worshipper. I spent decades of my life looking for something to throw myself into, body and mind and soul, and thus to free myself from the horrifying responsibility of being an I.

I never found it. But being a benevolent sort of deity to my characters, I give them a version of this thing I never found for myself. I subject them to, I bless them with, a totalitarian Lust which overwhelms and annihilates them.

I spent decades of my life, you see, wishing to be annihilated, because that was the only way I could imagine breaking free of the incarcerating I.

"It had come to him," Mary Renault wrote in The Charioteer, "that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity; the rest always to be alien, he to be I."

Laurie, thinking this, is a child. As a child I had the same epiphany; as an adolescent and young adult I carried so many things that were so heavy that I didn't have the energy or space to think of the I as a prison or burden: it was simply the first fact of my life.

Being a benevolent sort of deity to my characters, I don't weigh them down with the things I carried, ugly and unshapely. The joke, however, is on me; or rather, the joy, in the end, is mine: I've realized now at mid life that the Deity which is the Universe which is Existence—which is also Beauty—is yet also Love.

And so this my first post comes full circle; and so I intimate the outlines of the next. ♡