Beyond skin deep
Confronted with beauty, I realized my own struggle with it is something I haven't yet caught up with.
It’s not every day that I find myself in the company of perfection. Less so in these wildly isolating times. Recently, though, I had a chance encounter.
***
A few days ago, I got my hands on a selection of ‘first flush’ or spring season teas from Darjeeling. Spring teas are plucked after a long winter-induced hiatus between February and March. Young shoots are chosen for making this tea and seeing as how rife they are with delicate flavours, these leaves spend very little time in the factory trough and are subjected to very little oxidation. This way, not only does the tea retain a greenish appearance but also the season’s fragrant flavours, especially in the aroma.
From the three that were sent to me, I was immediately drawn to the spring black tea from Goomtee, a high-elevation tea garden located in the Kurseong valley. The garden has a stellar reputation for consistently producing high-quality ‘specialty’ teas and my experience over the years confirms this. Years had passed since I last tried a Goomtee.
Excited, I dashed towards my kitchen, went on my toes and pulled out my tasting set and tea timer from the back of the kitchen cabinet. Not that I couldn’t toss the tea in a cup of hot water and be done. But a proper tea tasting set often allows me to make an already joyful activity of drinking tea even better. Also, because of the year I have had, dangerously deprived of fine experiences, I just naturally err on the side of overcompensation now.
As soon as I ripped the seal off the zip lock pouch, heady notes of mountain flowers - lilies, orchids, and gardenia - and cashew (in fact it was cashews mixed with roasted almonds), without warning, shocked my nose, enveloping me in a floral-nutty haze. I couldn’t help but feel as if the fragrances had been gathering themselves for a while, just waiting to be unleashed. In this intense little fragrance bubble, if I tried hard enough, I could even pick subtle sweet green notes resembling pea shoots and carrot greens. While these leafy-grassy notes are common in less oxidised teas that retain a lot of their ‘green’, they felt fleeting in this particular tea. Also because the florals were concentrated and they just kept tugging at my senses. Irresistible!
Snapping out of the trance, I reached inside and drew a heap of tea and placed it on my palm. Even in the dull light of my living room, the leaves glistened. It was the silver tips - ample silver tips mixed with olive-green leaves - one leaf and a bud in this case - and bright green individual leaf specks. The leaves were even, slender, and dry as a bone: all hallmarks of a fresh, high-grade tea. In the cup, the light yellow tea was crisp and rife with floral aromas and flavours. My nose picked jasmine, citrus blossoms, and gardenia almost as soon as I lifted the lid off the tasting cup. And at once, I was inhaling a spring garden in full bloom. But what caught my attention was that each scent, while high octane, felt even. Each note was evenly layered and moved across the nose and the palate in a clean order; no one note was struggling for stage-time. The sip was rich but clear and revealed, with a lot of ease, all sorts of flavours that encompass floral, sweet green, and nutty spectrum, one after the other. This dazzling tea was an undeniable expression of Darjeeling spring. But with flavours that unfolded in deep, perfectly even, elegant layers.
This quality of ‘elegant evenness’ intrigued me. It’s not unusual for high-grown, high-grade teas to be intensely perfumy. But with this particular tea, the structural and textural makeup of the flavours felt almost too perfect. So much so that the superb symmetry and nuanced balance of flavour genuinely made me wonder if something cosmic was at play, maybe a higher-order controlling every aspect of this tea. Making sure that the tea does not veer and delivers perfectly.
I sat with these thoughts for a few minutes. Outside, it was still bright yet balmy. To catch the sun, I had to lean sharply on the window sill at an angel my 30-something body no longer allows. But the absence of summer heat and accompanying humidity made the hour slightly bearable that day.
Inside, nothing about sitting in a faded orange plastic chair in the middle of a dimly lit living room (ground floor apartment woes), tasting fine teas for someone else (a client) in drab-old tank and pyjamas at four in the evening in what was a yet-another-lockdown weekend, spelt ‘enviable life situation’. Compared to the pretty perfection I had just experienced, hardly anything about my current state - physical and emotional - read control and consideration, forget pretty or perfection. The more I got into the highland tea’s beauty, in this tepid terroir of grey and gloom, the more daunting the subject of beauty felt.
That day I learnt that experiencing idealness, perfection, and flawlessness can also feel severely alienating. That experiencing the beauty of another can also be an unwelcome reminder of the lack of it in your own life.
And that’s the headspace I occupied that evening. Alienated. Flawed. Ugly. Everything that beauty is not.
For a minute, just the thought that I was concerning myself with matters of beauty in these dangerously grim times felt vain. How did my mind even land on this thought, I can’t tell you. But that evening, caught between the folly of age, the reality of a pitiless lockdown, and a just-getting-by state, my mind just went tumbling.
As I sat with the tea’s beauty, I started to think about the countless hours I’d spent working on my own appeal. As far back as I could look, all I remember is me wanting to be as beautiful as my best friend. And as bold as my elder sister. As smart as my polymath classmate. And as desired as the girl who sat next to me all three years of college. I don’t think I began this way, as someone constantly wanting to be like someone else. Pictures from childhood, in which I look rather self-contained and confident, tell me I was fairly comfortable in my skin. All the same, somewhere everything about my life became relational.
How I fare compared to others - on counts of education, looks, personality - began defining me from very early on. I don’t remember ever turning inwards to just see myself, for myself. I don’t think I even knew that was a ‘thing’. Where I grew up, your worth, in every sense of that word, was defined by how you compare to the prevalent notions of ‘ideal’. Someone else was always in charge of checking your boxes - your mom, your friend, your teachers, your high school crush. So it was clear that worth is a verdict that is not mine to pass. And it didn’t help that measuring myself against set ideals always had me coming up short.
What would have happened if I, a struggling teen or even a young 20 something, had just stopped, once, and looked at myself without comparing?
Well, for starters, that seems unlikely to have happened. Where I grew up, we kids lived as if we were in a fierce contest of who’s better than who. Even though we lived in this diverse, multi-cultural township of scientists, doctors, and engineers, it was very much a winner-takes-all world. You were either a class topper or dumb, beautiful or unseen, good or bad. Because their social standing was at stake, adults - family and teachers included - made it a point to call out which side of the goodness scale you were on and who you needed to out-perform. It was simply never enough to just do your best. You had to be better than others - in classrooms, at extracurricular activities, at home. The reward? Status and validation. And the thing is, you could see validation on someone. They carried it and projected it proudly. Similarly, there was immense shame in losing and being invalidated, and it showed. If you were not coming up at the top, you knew you did not matter. And who wants to feel that way?
I don’t know who put these conditions in place. But they existed and were widely accepted as a way of life. Because your entire purpose, as a child, was to make yourself better than the kid ahead of you, you were always oriented outwards and in a state of competition. And back then, I had no choice but to compete in this tournament. It did not matter if I was even capable of a fight. I just had to fight the hard fight and work towards a win.
Whatever attention there was came in the form of judgment. My own included. I started believing that because I didn’t grow up meeting the conventional standards of beauty and intelligence, I was always going to be a little less smart, a little more fat, or a little less interesting than someone or the other in a room. Someone else was always going to be better than me.
Then on, the more I saw someone else’s beauty, the heavier was the weight and the reality of my own ugliness.
I remember all those hours I spent trying to hide my unpleasants. I made every attempt to read the hardest books in school even though I did not enjoy them just so I could cover my averageness. I denied myself lipstick throughout my 20s because I didn’t want the crossbite behind those lips to grab any attention. I did not take pictures with pretty people because I knew my blemished face would always appear jarring next to all that flawlessness.
Somewhere I also became sure that efforts by themselves aren’t enough. That second-order effect of those efforts - wins and losses - are what mattered. I may be spending every waking hour trying to eat healthily, but if I wasn’t losing weight, I was a failure. If my face did not clear up even after getting every possible treatment, I was a failure. If my project was scrapped after working on it for over a year and delivering on every expectation, I was, yet again, a failure. I genuinely believed that out there, the world was fine, fair and gave me enough grounds to flourish. It was me who kept failing myself. It was me who failed to make myself attractive. It was me who prevented validation from happening.
Today, having grown older and wiser, much of it thanks to therapy, my heart has a lot more room for self-love and acceptance. My self-worth is now more than the good-bad binary. I am all of it and I am also in-betweens. But my orientation to beauty remains outwards. I can’t yet define it, and so I don’t yet know how to own it. I think beauty is what makes you look good to others. And when you look good to others, something inside you feels at ease.
As for my beauty, it continues to live in an external environment. It’s out there. At a distance. With someone. In here, all I see and feel are struggle, chaos, and failures.
I feel a pit in my stomach even writing this but I honestly don’t know what it’s like to live with a sense of beauty. Do you? Can you tell me how it feels?
***
When I was learning about teas, one of my mentors at the plantation institute taught me that my job was to spot potential in tea. No matter what was in the cup, no tea was simply 'good' or 'bad'. Rather, every tea was made with an intention and reflected conscious thought. My job, then, was to identify and relay that information to the buyer. Because the value of a tea boiled down to its level of perceived beauty, I, as a tea taster, could shape its fate. With this realisation began a series of exercises in empathy, but with tea.
This did not mean I was no longer looking for flaws. I was, in a way, looking for beauty inside the flaws. I was championing for each tea to win and made every attempt to draw out and underscore the most wonderful qualities of a tea, no matter how little or obscure or fleeting they would be.
At the institute, I learnt to perceive beauty from the lens of conditions and conditioning. By looking at the land that birthed the tea - the soil, the cultivar, the surrounding fauna and flora - I could understand both the circumstances as well as the constraints surrounding a tea. By learning the intentions of the maker, I could better grasp the potential of tea and compare it to what was delivered in the cup. Combined, I would get a mental picture that captured a lot more truth than what the visible cues alone delivered. Sure this method is cumbersome, even indulgent, but this way of arriving at beauty now settles well with me. For one, it doesn’t threaten me with the notion of divine beauty - that someone/something is beautiful for unexplainable, cosmic reasons. Instead, it illustrates causality. Clear links between why something looks and feels the way it does. A near-logical justification for beauty.
Sure one can apply this lens to everyday life. I know people who do. These are humans who believe that surface-level beauty, by itself, reveals very little. And to stop at this beauty is to miss a deeper understanding and connection.
But I also know that to venture beyond observable beauty, requires more than a pair of eyes. Who even has that kind of time, let alone the intention to go deeper than skin deep?
***
That day, the tea in my cup was pure and pretty, fresh and balanced. The twin forces of good conditions and good conditioning had combined to ensure a remarkable drinking experience and the high praise of perfection well-earned. And if you took the time to dig deep, you’d see clearly that the tea’s beauty was intentional; an outcome, not a given. At the same time, I found myself asking if this is how I may want to be seen.
A big part of me does.
I am not a prisoner of my afflictions when I say that I am comfortable, today, with the knowledge that I am not the kind of person that is desired immediately. This is why there’s a part of me that believes I can only be desirable if someone goes out of their way to consider my stories, my intelligence, and my accomplishments. Compensating for my natural lack of likability seems to be the only way I can increase the odds of becoming desirable in someone else’s eyes.
But no one’s yet holding up their kind mirror to me. And my own is harsh enough.
I also know there are other ways to be desired - project confidence in your own skin and form, own your flaws, be your own best champion and all that. And I genuinely want to, with all my heart, subscribe to this wonderfully kind notion of beauty. Where you polish your own mirror to smoothen the sharp edges and let the light of kindness shine over it and reflect wide. But honestly, it just feels unfair.
Why should I have to do this? Why do I have to be enough for myself? Will I never be beautiful to anyone other than me? Never seen unless she’s heard?
I don’t know if I even want to answer these questions.
Just admitting them is hard enough.
***
As I write this piece, a thought is stuck in my mind. I can’t help but wonder if the tea - my Goomtee first flush black tea - sees its own beauty. Without someone choosing it and validating it, does its ‘elegant evenness’ even exist?
Knowing that beauty is realized when experienced, would all its potential and promise collide into nothing?
I like to think someone will always be there to choose it...
I'll go a step further than this "These are humans who believe that surface-level beauty, by itself, reveals very little." - surface level beauty of a human reveals nothing about them - its like you being asked to judge a tea by looking at the assortment of dry leaf, in a plastic bag! The facade is not the person.
I love your writing, btw <3