On Beautiful

            Sometimes I believe we’re given words we’re not ready for. When you grow up with a formal education vocabulary is one of the most consistent subjects from elementary school all the way through higher education. We’re constantly told to seek out new words, look up words we encounter that are unfamiliar, and employ an extensive vocabulary in our everyday lives (even if it’s never seemed socially beneficial to drop SAT vocab words in everyday life). However, I don’t think it’s always the most complicated or high-brow words that we’re not ready for. Sometimes our voice is just not skilled enough to adequately convey words.

            It took me a long time to be comfortable saying the word “beautiful.” Especially once I hit an age where I could understand my own voice and how it was perceived, beautiful always seemed to eek out of my mouth in flagrant and unattractive way. It was almost like I couldn’t correctly pronounce it, but I never suffered from any speech disorders or had trouble with pronunciation at all. It was similar to  when Spanish students can’t roll their tongue. The word was there but something intangible was missing. I remember being fourteen and making a decision to stop attempting to say the word beautiful. I didn’t like how it sounded crawling out of my mouth, and I decided I would have to shelve beautiful until I could figure out exactly what I was doing wrong. Beautiful stayed out of my vocabulary for most of my adolescence, constantly being replaced with “pretty,” or “attractive.”

            Even when I had my first semi-serious relationship in late high school I found it uncomfortable to call my then-girlfriend beautiful. I knew she was, or at least I had that opinion of her, but trying to call her beautiful always ended in a small pang of internal embarrassment and a sort of time-traveling slingshot back to my fourteen-year-old self. The weight of beautiful sort of hung on my conscious for a few years, its meaning somehow totally clear while its proper execution remaining a myth. I wondered if this would be some deep-seated premonition of my conception of beauty—that maybe I had some shame or guilt associated with beauty resting deep in my teenage core. I don’t think that was ever the case, but I guess I’ll never be sure.

            I have almost no issue saying the word beautiful now, at age twenty-one. In fact, I think I can pronounce it well, and that I have a better understanding of when to use it and how. I’ve had girlfriends (and a few boyfriends) that I’ve been able to consistently call beautiful—because they were. I no longer felt like I needed to keep “beautiful” on my imaginary vocab shelf. I enjoy describing things (mountains, plays, milkshakes, typefaces) as beautiful now too, never hesitating to call beauty when I see it, and using the specific adjective derived from the noun beauty.

            I don’t know exactly what happened when I put beautiful away for a number of years, but I have to believe that its time on the bench helped me. Maybe I’ve just experienced more life, and have a better understanding of beauty as a concept. Let’s not ignore the obvious, the word beautiful packs a large meaning. We use words like beautiful everyday and undersell their significance.

“That episode of 30 Rock was awesome.”

Was it really? Are you really in awe? Is a 30-minute comedy TV show truly capable of inspiring awe? Maybe it is, but I believe there is value in asking ourselves these questions. They make us better at choosing the words we need, not necessarily the words we know.

 Perhaps words like beautiful require time to process. Maybe my voice wasn’t ready for beautiful because my mind wasn’t either. Do we really give ourselves enough time as learning and growing humans to understand such large concepts as beauty? I like to think that my fourteen-year-old self did something responsible when he put away beautiful. Now I can let the word out of my mouth with ease and precision. At twenty-one I feel ready for beautiful. Expression is a tough game, but maybe the key to making it easier is giving some of your most uncomfortable words some time out.