I have a fun little theory that I've been stress-testing for years now, it holds up every single time without exception and it’s hilarious. I can tell within minutes if an extremely beautiful girl grew up beautiful or whether she glowed up later in life.
Fun fact I saw Madison Beer not too long ago and she was standing close enough to me that I genuinely forgot how to breathe for a moment because she is that beautiful in person. Stunning figure, sun-kissed light caramel-tan skin, long silky hair cascading down her back, a beautifully sculpted face….And then ten minutes passed and it was already over. The practiced pout, the hair flick deployed at precise intervals, the suggestive shift of weight from one hip to the other, the poses that suggested she was perpetually aware of being observed and had made her peace with performing for it. There was just no charge to her and I knew that if I ever spent real time with her I would be exhausted by the effort of finding things to sustain my interest and I would fail.
The girl who grew up beautiful (truly, obviously, undeniably beautiful from a young age) has a very specific texture to her. She is, and I say this as an observation rather than an indictment, often very flat. There is a blankness there that you don't notice at first because the packaging is so arresting but the moment you get close enough to actually interact with her it becomes apparent almost immediately like someone who learned very early that simply being looked at was sufficient and never needed to develop much beyond that. She says something mildly banal and assumes (correctly) that everyone in her immediate vicinity will receive it like gospel, and they will, and she has been conditioned by a lifetime of that feedback loop into believing that this constitutes a personality.
The woman who had a glow up later in life is an entirely different creature. She had to be funny before anyone was paying attention to whether she was funny and she had to be smart and quick and compelling and worth talking to. And then the beauty arrived on top of all of that and the result is just … there is no competition. She is funny and sharp and self-possessed and smart and she knows how to hold a room. There are little things that give it away like niche fixations, unapologetic strangeness an eccentric style.
When I first came into myself, and it happened fast enough that I was genuinely unprepared for the social consequences, I realized almost immediately that I could not bring myself to care. Strangers stopped me on the street to tell me I was beautiful, that my eyes were stunning, that they had to say something because they couldn't just walk past. Men followed me around the city, home, through stores. Colleagues developed fixations that became untenable and eventually became HR problem to manage. Men asked for my number with the desperation of someone who believes they are witnessing something rare and needs to possess it. And every single one of these experiences felt… superficial is almost too gentle a word. Off-putting. If a man has ever looked at me the way men look at something they want to be seen holding, I have felt it instantly and it has never failed to produce a very specific and visceral revulsion in me. I have no interest in being perceived as a trophy.
At first I still felt like baby Zora with messy hair and thick glasses and unruly brows and braces and apologetic about taking up space. I hated having my picture taken and I was always the one behind the camera because that felt safer and more natural and less presumptuous somehow and now occasionally someone asks if they can take a photo with me for their social media or lead me to the center on group photos and something in me short-circuits for a moment because it doesn't compute. When I was younger the only thing I ever wanted was to beautiful and I had anticipated, naively, that the whole thing would feel like an arrival. Like something clicking into place but it didn't. It felt like being handed something that belonged to someone else, I feel very detached from it but I had to learn to yield it like a weapon.
It’s funny because on multiple occasions, people have asked me ( both men and women both and with genuine curiosity rather than flattery) ‘you know you're beautiful, right?’ And my honest answer is that I know it the way I know my own height. It is a fact about me that exists independently of how I feel about it on any given day. It is just there, it doesn't feel like mine in the way that my sense of humor feels like mine, or my opinions, or the specific texture of how my mind works. I've noticed that my lack of interest in external validation is often misread as arrogance. Ironically, people seem to think you should feel flattered or grateful just because someone wants to sleep with you, but that's never been something I base my self-worth on.
And do not even get me started on the men who respond to a perfectly ordinary observation from me with some variation of you're so smart, delivered with the specific tone of someone who has been pleasantly surprised by a dog doing arithmetic. The idea that beauty and intelligence exist in some kind of zero-sum arrangement and that encountering both simultaneously in one person constitutes a minor miracle. The strangest part of the whole transition, the part I didn't anticipate and still find mildly absurd, is having to quietly retire certain habits that made complete sense when I was invisible and make absolutely no sense now that I'm apparently not. I had to learn that the wings are real now but the muscle memory of the caterpillar was still very much in the body, and I had to learn to move like what I’ve become rather than what I was.
