It probably didn’t help that the beauty standards I held myself to were rigid and impractical. Like most teen girls (whether they’re trans or cis), I had a vision board of my ideal, pulled mostly from the pop-culture images that MTV fed me. I wanted Halle Berry’s or Tyra Banks’s breasts, Britney Spears’s midsection, Beyoncé’s curvy silhouette and long hair, and I prayed that I wouldn’t grow any taller so I didn’t tower over the petite Asian girls who were the barometer of beauty in the islands.
I don’t think I even really tried to be pretty until I lived in Los Angeles because most of the people I knew were white and I didn’t think those people where I grew up thought I was pretty. I wasn’t considered attractive to my own ethnicity because my features don’t fit how they define beauty, round face shape and cute as my mom explained to me. . I thought I was different but being different is part of who I was and who I am. But I got to Los Angeles in 2006 and now I get to love being different and being beautiful even though learning to love being beautiful took work. See my Facebook page, link in profile, and check out my album, My Life by Meena Menon, for how I learned to love being beautiful. The section beginning 2009 has a lot about that, but the sections before are interesting too.
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Meena Menon
