Inner Beauty: What Are Your Standards?

When I was in New York, I was constantly judged by my looks. Some would say I wasn’t as attractive as they thought I would be, some would make snide comments regarding my appearance while I would stroll around in sweats in the uptown Williamsburg, and some of my ‘peers’ took to social media making claims, without saying my name but markedly directing their frustrations towards me, about seeing my rough outer appearance and their disdain over my own disregard for how I looked. But through it all? I never really cared.

I was always taught to never judge a book by its cover. Naively, I thought everyone shared that same awareness. I do not judge people by how they look, what they wear, their outer beauty, their aesthetic misfortune, for that matter, their artistic proclivities, the superficial, and by standards that don’t really matter. Since I carry this decency with me everywhere I go, I thought others innately did as well.

Well, boy, was I wrong. And I’ve always had some sort of fashion sense. I love fashion and just because I didn’t take pride in the way I looked on an off-day doesn’t make me completely aesthetically inept. Could I have made more of an effort? Sure. But I didn’t expect the backlash that I experienced from critics and various social media peers alike.

So I’m going to reiterate a sentiment that we learned in kindergarten but, clearly, sometimes forget: it doesn’t matter what people look like. The type of clothes someone wears, one’s sexual orientation, one's gender are also of little importance when it comes to judging a friend. How would you judge a friend? Surely, by standards worth judging someone on, like their character, where they stand when it comes to gender equality, and their own progressive initiatives, for example.

I have never felt the sting of being so judged by how I looked until I lived in New York. What an experience that was for me. I know now that I will never afford that type of judgement on someone else. Their truth lies on the inside, not on the clothes they wear or their harmless external interests.