“And you don’t have to change a thing,
The world could change its heart.
No scars to your beautiful,
We’re stars and we’re beautiful”
— Alessia Cara, “Scars to Your Beautiful”
There is a photograph the algorithm prefers. She is lit from the left. Her skin is even. Her body has been edited into a shape no surgeon, and no season of life, can promise. She smiles as if nothing has ever cost her. We scroll past her a hundred times before breakfast and call the feeling inspiration. It is not inspiration. It is a measuring stick.
I wrote about this in the Summer 2024 issue. I said then what I still believe: there is no perfect. It is an elusive thing, and for too many years I chased it outward — weight, hair, the smoothness of skin — while I handed other people the keys to my worth. What I did not say plainly enough is what that chase does to a woman when her body changes for reasons that have nothing to do with vanity.
My mother fought breast cancer. She wanted to live. She was brave, and she was not spared. I have sat since with women who did survive the same disease, and with women who are living inside it now. They talk about the scar. The reconstruction that did not look like the photograph. The hair that came back different or did not come back. The friend who meant well and said, “You look so normal.” As if normal were the prize. As if the body that carried them through surgery, radiation, fear, and the long night were something to be apologized for.
Social media did not invent the demand that women be flawless. It only made the demand constant, and it hid the cost. Cover girls, the song says, don’t cry after their face is made. The feed does not cry either. It does not show the port, the drains, the 3 a.m. bargaining, the woman standing in front of a mirror deciding whether she is still allowed to be seen. We have stigmatized the very evidence of having lived.
I keep returning to a conversation shared in ELYSIAN’s 2017 Winter issue with Phyllis Newhouse — soldier, entrepreneur, a woman who rose from private to command sergeant major and built what others said could not be built. Her son, Ezekiel, once told her he was not sure he ‘was enough’ beside the path she had taken. She stopped him. “Son, you are always enough. You are enough. I don’t care if you did anything else today. You are enough.” She said it is the most important thing we can tell the people we love. I think it is also the most important thing we can tell ourselves, especially when the body we have is not the body the feed is selling.
Women to women, then. Not as a slogan. As a practice.
You do not have to earn your place by matching an image that was never a person. You do not have to wait until the scar fades, the weight returns, the hair cooperates, the grief settles. Alessia Cara’s line is not softness for its own sake. It is a correction: no scars to your beautiful. The scar is not the opposite of beauty. Often it is the proof of it. The light she sings about is not applied. It is already there.
If this newsletter does anything, I hope it gives you permission to throw the perfect away. Not ambition. Not care. Not the desire to be well. The perfect — the one that cannot be reached, and that punishes you for the reaching. Love the woman who is here. Tell her she is enough before the day asks her to perform.
To every reader walking through illness, recovery, ordinary aging, or the quiet exhaustion of being watched: you are not behind. You are not a draft of someone else. You are enough.
With much love,
Karen Floyd,
ELYSIAN Publisher & Founder