The Sophomore Year Experience at TCNJ

By: Carly DaSilva

Things that I know to be true. Number two.

There are times when I’m walking, and I really look at everything. I look at the edges of lampposts and the shuddering buds on tree branches; I look at the flurry of quick small birds skittering across the sky, the dried leaves dancing over the pavement, the grass and the mud and the passing faces. Everything I see is remarkably lovely. Every snapped branch. Every stone.

Every face.

People, all people, human beings, are brilliant. Think for a second about your life. You are a cache of inimitable memories that are uniquely your own. There are things that you don’t remember, and things that you do, vividly. There are things you want to forget. Painful things. But here you are, in this moment, and that pain is in the past. You managed to get through it, and your being here and reading this right now is proof of that.

Now, think about the fact that the above paragraph is relevant to every single person, anyone who reads it.

We are all individuals, with our own unique tastes and traits and aspirations and fears and outlooks and beliefs. But despite this, we are very much the same. We laugh and cry in turn. We suffer and triumph. We often feel we are alone in our miseries, but the opposite is true; everyone experiences pain. It connects us. Everyone is doubtful and afraid sometimes, or brave, or panicked, or reassured. Everyone experiences life in different ways, but still everyone experiences life. We live our individual stories and weave them into the stories of others and though they may come in a multitude of colors and materials, they’re all yarn. We’re all human.

We’re all miraculous, and valuable, and especially beautiful.

How could this not be true? There is so much to each and every one of us. There is so much to know! Every stranger you see is a story you’ve never read, and the way they look is about as important as a book’s cover. Sure, it’s the cover that’s supposed to catch your eye, but even a book with a design you aren’t quite taken with can have an incredibly compelling blurb on the back or a summary of the story that sweeps you away.

Book covers are tricky things. I recently interviewed several experts for an article about them, and one of them told me that people often say book covers sell books. He knows this is not the case, because seeing the cover is only the first step of many, and every person has a different taste in cover art. Every person likes something different. This is true of not only people and books, but also people and people.

When you look at a person, you assess them in your mind. It isn’t beauty that you’re assessing, not really, because the beauty of a person is inarguably present equally powerful within all us. You’re assessing various visible physical traits, comparing them to visible physical traits that you personally like or dislike. You’re assessing your own attraction to the person you’re looking at, your own personal attraction, unique from that of others, though people can be attracted to the same traits (being that there are so many of us, it probably happens rather often).

People have preferences when it comes to people. Some traits are considered “universally attractive,” but this honestly just means that a large amount of people have an interest in a particular trait. Not fitting a “universally attractive” mold doesn’t make you unattractive. Fitting a “universally attractive” mold doesn’t make you attractive.

Attractiveness is something that is perceived by an individual, something that is subject to change depending on whose eyes are doing the looking.

Beauty is. You are it, as is everything else in this big wide world.

Again… the “everyone’s beautiful” thing is familiar to all of us. We hear it everywhere, but it’s lost among airbrushed images and negative slurs that erupt in moments of emotional irrationality. It’s something people tend to find difficult to believe, but I mean, let’s see.

I challenge you to look, to really look, the next time you’re walking around campus. See people. Watch them laugh and talk and gesture and think. Think about how you laugh and talk and gesture and think each day. Know the beauty in every person you see. Embrace it.

Then look in the mirror and smile at yourself.

I don’t think I have to explain why.

Carly DaSilva is an English major and the current secretary of INK (the College’s creative writing organization). She surrounds herself with stories, reading them, writing them, and helping them travel from scripts to the stage