When I expressed my frustration about this to my therapist, he told me, “You have what I call the ‘curse of attractiveness.’ Many women, especially women in the [eating disorder] program, have this. It’s an interesting phenomenon.” What the curse means, in a nutshell, is that beautiful girls are valued for only that, our beauty. We find this confusing and troubling, and here’s why.
We are sad, beautiful girls because we learned, from a very young age, that how we look is more important than how we think, what we know, or what we can do. This is a curse because we don’t want to be valued for how we look. Looks fade, always. This is a curse too, because people assume that attractive people must be happy. What more could a beautiful girl ask for? We are sad, sometimes, because we are expected to be happy. We are expected to know that we’re beautiful and for that to be enough.