“Every  time you see a beautiful woman just remember, somebody got tired of her.” – Liz Taylor

When I was in my early 30′s  I was living in Hollywood, and it was important for me to be attractive.    I was 112 lbs, a size 4, doing yoga every day and feeling great.   I had lots of dates and loved being single.    I never had plastic surgery, but worked really hard at refining what I was born with.  It was nice being  pretty,  I got into clubs without standing in line, I got free drinks, guys held the door for me, I got jobs easier than the plain girls.  Everyone wanted to be my friend and that was just great because I was working on being a good, kind person and I thought that was what they were interested in.  Little did I know then.

Life just bobbed along nicely for me.  I found a really sweet guy and got married, and we moved into a great apartment in the Valley and he had a good job at Louis Vuitton and he had access to high fashion and could get free makeup and accessories from work,  which I loved because being beautiful was part of my job… until  I was diagnosed with Lupus.

Lupus runs in my family, and it killed my Aunt, so I was pretty scared.   First the rashes came, then my hair started falling out in clumps.  I nearly went bald the first time and had to  wear a wig.  My Rheumatologist put me on steroids and then I got REALLY FAT.  I couldn’t control the weight gain, I would eat like 500 calories a day and I would still gain weight while taking the steroids.  I had a small stroke which slightly paralyzed half of my face, and to this day my smile is now crooked.  Then I started having seizures and I was so terrified that anyone would see me have one that I just stopped leaving the house.  I hated myself.  I was balding, pockmarked with bloody scabs on my face and I had to do physical  rehab from the minor paralysis.  It was a terrifying time.  I had only been married a little over a year when all this happened.

I stopped singing because I was sure that nobody wanted to look at me, and I was terrified of having a seizure on stage.  Many of my friends complained about my weight gain and asked me, “Why are you getting so fat?  Are you just sitting around eating candy bars?”  Needless to say, many of those friends fell away quickly, when I wasn’ t attractive anymore and couldn’t keep up with their standards.    I became a recluse, and stayed at home painting pictures and hiding from the world.  I was 35 when I totally went into seclusion.

Looking back on all of this, it was pretty tough, but sometimes hardships can be a blessing in disguise.

When I became ill and my looks faded, I had to start interacting with the world in a whole new way.  Batting my eyelashes suddenly failed to impress people.  Nobody held the door for me, nobody gazed appreciatively at me, strangers didn’t offer me their seat or do favors for me.  I was ignored or even treated with hostility.  When I had gained about 80 lbs after being on steroids for 2 years, I blimped out to a size 22 and  people would even glare at me in public.  Not people I knew, but random people in convenience stores, in waiting rooms, in line, anywhere in public.  This had never happened to me before.  People had always been kind to me,  but looking the way I did, people were indifferent at best.   My face had burst into a huge round circle known as the steroid moon face, and I was barely recognizable.    I had been hiding away in my apartment for 2 years, when an old model  friend spotted  me out at the grocery store and was shocked that she barely recognized me.  She was nice, but it was hard for her to cover her alarm and distress when she saw how I had changed.  She’d  worked for Louis Vuitton with my husband, and didn’t keep friends that weren’t attractive, so she never followed up with her promise of coffee and chat.  I knew why and I hated myself, I hated having Lupus, and I hated the world.

It was around that time that we moved to Chicago for my husband’s new job, and since I had gone to college there I had some old friends and music contacts, but I was terrified to call anyone because of my illness and how bad I looked.  I stayed alone in our apartment that first year until I ran into an old musician friend who was glad to see me, but seemed concerned at my physical changes, but not dismayed or disgusted by them.  I was so grateful for that, and she got me to start going out among people again, little by little.   Chicagoans didn’t seem as  harsh in their appraisal of my physical appearance the way the people in LA were.  I even started going out a little bit to hear jazz concerts and to reconnect with some of the musicians I had worked with.  I was scared to death that they wouldn’t want to speak to me when they saw how I had changed, but  most of them were just concerned for my health, and very few of them remarked upon my appearance.  This was encouraging, so I gathered a group  of them and  went into the recording studio and began creating a new jazz record, and I started singing  for the first time in over 10 years.  It was around this time that I  found a wonderful Lupus doctor in Chicago who took me off the steroids and got me on some more natural therapies which helped put my disease into a kind of remission for the first time since I was diagnosed years before.  It was like a miracle, and to make things even better, I started to lose weight when I stopped taking the steroids.  I have lost a good amount of it and I am healthier than I’ve been in almost 10 years, and my life is so much richer and better than I think it ever was… wonder why?

Why am I talking about this and telling my story?  Do I seemed like a self absorbed twit?  Well, I don’t think I’d be telling my story if it weren’t for all the stress and pressure society puts on women to be ultimately beautiful and desirable at all times.  Mine isn’t a unique story for Lupus patients.  How many of you have become ill and had disfiguring rashes, hair loss and weight gain?  How many of you suffer with the decline in your physical appearance and self esteem?  It’s a pretty common theme for many women living with the Wolf.  But the amazing thing that all of this hardship has taught me is that physical beauty is not as important as inner beauty and self esteem, and that society and it’s standards of beauty which try to control women and ruin their confidence can go to hell.  I’m in my mid 40′s now, and I see a lot of my beauty queen, model and actress girlfriends from LA going nuts… especially if they haven’t hooked a rich husband or don’t have the money for plastic surgery.  Nobody notices them anymore, nobody holds the door for them, they don’t get special treatment like they used to … they have become common, middle aged women.  At 45 many of them are starting to have a mid life crisis because they don’t know how they are going to get by in the world without their youthful beauty.  They have to think of other ways to get attention, to get jobs, to get money… that won’t involve their looks and it either frightens them, or it boosts them up.  At 35 my looks were gone, even though I hadn’t started that 40-something sag.  But I learned to deal with it, and I started working on my personality, and tried to attract new friends because of who I was and  what I could do – not because of what I looked like.  There are lots of people who do this every day.   I started taking voice lessons again and tried to get gigs because of how well I could sing and perform, not because I was any better looking than the other singers.   What a twit I was!  It took a lot of suffering and illness before I realized that beauty is something INSIDE of you, not your exterior.  Looks fade, skin sags and wrinkles, but your brains, talent and ambition… that’s something inside of you.  I don’t think society wants women to realize this because then it couldn’t control and dominate them.  So I am posting this blog today to ask other women to push off the shackles of beauty and to live a genuine life and to follow their dreams and goals, for themselves… and not to live a life that seeks to constantly please other people.   Who you are lasts a life time, your youthful beauty fades away and can mean very little  before more than half of your life is through.  What are you going to do with the next 40 years?  Chase something that you’ve lost?  Why not become someone new that YOU might like better?  I grew up in the 1970′s during a time when natural beauty was popular.  Not wearing a lot of makeup and looking like yourself.  These days everyone has plastic surgery and a boob job.  What’s happened to women’s self esteem in 2011?  Generations X Girls that were raised on Barbie dolls are hitting menopause… how will they handle it all?

 

Some folks  might just think that this is all sour grapes, or that I’m having a pity party for myself, but I’m not.  I’m a much happier person today than I’ve ever been.  I feel more fulfilled and satisfied than I ever have in my whole life.  People come to hear me sing these days and I am sure that it’s because they like the sound of my voice, not because I’m a size 4 with clear skin.    Maybe they like the new way  I tell stories in my songs  that make them feel something.  I couldn’t do that when I was young and trying to be ultimately beautiful, I didn’t know what a lot of those songs really meant.   I wasn’t touching people’s hearts,  I was up on display…  but I know a thing or two now.  I try really hard to look my best, but because I am still  on and off steroids and starting menopause,  I am having a heck of a time getting small again, and some people still criticize my weight.   But you know,  people were telling me how fat I was when I was 112 lbs!   I guess if you can’t control a woman any other way you must criticize her weight.   I’m healthy now,  and very fit, and I enjoy working out daily even though I can’t seem to get below a size 12.  Sometimes I still get rashes and my hair falls out and my face still sags a tiny bit on one side from the stroke…. but I don’t worry about all of that because my new friends like me for my personality, and my fans like me for how well I can sing.  I’ve had to work hard at developing a personality and talents over  the past 10 years  to compensate for my lost looks, and it was worth it.    My friends  like me now for the love that I carry in my heart for them and for myself.  But I never learned to have any of this when I was trying to be  a barbie doll -  it was so completely lost on me.   I have much more compassion for other people and what they are going through in their lives now…. I didn’t understand or have much compassion then,  I was too busy trying to be pretty and looked down on other women that weren’t obsessed with beauty.  I think that my struggle for physical  perfection  kept me from becoming a whole person because I never had to work for much back then – my smile and and tight jeans got me where I needed to go.   Life seemed easier, but oh  how much more I have learned about the world as an overweight, unattractive, disabled  woman, and I can tell you about it when I sing  and when I paint a picture.  You will like this new me better than when I was just cute and batted my eyelashes at you.

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