I was thinking a lot about beauty when I was fifteen, the day I stood on the porch without

my headscarf on. I let my hair breathe in the open autumn air, feeling the softness tickling my

shoulders. A couple walking their dog passed our house and when they smiled at me I smiled

back and waved, waiting to feel pretty, a caterpillar finally growing her wings. The couple and

their dog rounded the corner, and I waited and waited. The wings did finally begin to grow, but

when I saw myself in the window, I was a moth, not a butterfly. I scurried for the safety of home,

but even inside with the front door locked, I felt for the first time, truly ugly.

I was thinking about beauty when I was seventeen, on my first day of college, covered

from head to toe in a traditional black gown, an abaya. I was finally prepared to be really, truly

myself. I was a veteran of the high school war of identity, and I’d come out of it barely

recognizable and more confused than I’d been than when I’d started. I had decided after

graduation to abandon the jeans and tights to finally accept my Muslim identity, to dress like the girls I saw in the Islamic fashion magazines. Their chins were held high, hair wrapped in chiffon, with their gowns trailing the floor elegantly. At the end of that first long impossible day, I fell onto my creaky dorm room bed and cried for half an hour, wrapped in my abaya and black

headscarf like a corpse in a shroud.

I have to think of beauty every morning, because no matter how tired I am, no matter

how hot or humid it is outside, I wrap a meter of fabric on my head and force myself to make myfaith bigger than my vanity. I frown. I turn to the side. I fluff and smooth and straighten, and I

stare at myself for a few seconds in the mirror and make myself think of strength and dignity.

Think of things bigger than myself. Like a student in an English lit class, I peel back the layers of

symbolism in the fabric and try to find the beauty hiding underneath, and pray that others find ittoo. I delicately pin the scarf in place. Pretty? Maybe. Beautiful? Always.