see the thing that is genuinely beautiful about every person

My friend J has escaped to the UK for a bit for a change of scenery. She’s working as an au pair for an excessively spoiled British family, and as such, having a very hard time making friends.

“Maybe I’m unattractive because I’m supposed to be single,” she told me after I asked her how the men across the pond were looking to her.

I could do the cliche thing and say, well, J is beautiful on the inside, etc, etc… But the truly sad thing about how she feels is that in actuality, she’s beautiful through and through!

I met her when she started dating a friend I used to have a thing for. I made up my mind not to like her. Then, when I went through a really hard time in my life where many of my “real” friends weren’t around, J was there for me. We had dinner every Monday night, religiously, and went to SPoT coffee together almost every weekend to do homework. Hearing her voice from across the ocean was the nicest thing so far this week.

Plus the girl is Greek and statuesque in the truest sense of the word- she’s gorgeous! She’s on 43T, even though she hasn’t updated it recently, but I hope she reads this and gets really, really angry at me :) She needs to see how beautiful she is!

The man from this post paid a visit to my pharmacy tonight.

It was my 11th straight hour of work, and I saw his face over the counter. I thought to myself, “oh no, here we go again.”

“I called to find out when you’d be working again. I am so sorry for my behavior, that is not how I act, that is not how I should act. You were a sweetheart who was trying to help me.”

What a surprise! I never expected it. It had happened over a week ago now. People will impress you if you let them.

Dear Large Bald Man,

You are an impediment to this goal. I have never, EVER, let a patient make me this upset. The first time you called me a “stupid bitch,” I was willing to ignore it because you needed your medication. After your string of comments about how I was trying to screw you out of your hard earned money by lying to you and also trying to kill you by withholding your pills, my ability to find anything beautiful about you disappeared.

I hope you realize that I was trying to help you. I hope that there is someone else out there willing to do the same thing who you will let see whatever is genuinely beautiful about you. I hope that occasionally you will let someone help you without taking out your frustrations on them.

Love, Amanda

“We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don’t like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground.”