The all-knowing, ruthless beauty god

I look into my mirror. What’s wrong with my hair? Are those new wrinkles? Have I gained weight?

Who’s talking?

The all-knowing, ruthless beauty god, says Cheryl Strayed.

We all know that looks really don’t matter and that, actually, they do matter to most of us, explains Strayed in her book Tiny Beautiful Things—Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar.

“I need only to do a quick accounting of just about every woman I’ve ever known—an endless phalanx of mostly attractive females who were freaked out because they were fat or flat-chested or frizzy-haired or oddly shaped or lined with wrinkles or laced with stretch marks or in some other way imperfect when viewed through the distorted eyes of the all-knowing, woman-annihilating, ruthless beauty god who has ruled and sometimes doomed significant portions of our lives.

“I say enough of that. Enough of that.”
–Joy