I love beauty.  

I love it in all incarnations.  

I love the soft curve of my daughter’s cheek, the churn of a coastline, the notched edge of a maple leaf.  I love the magnificence of great cathedrals and the sleek curve of a well-designed fork.

I love the butterfly stickers that I stick on my daily priority sheet.  I love printing it out each day with its swirly script and pretty colors.  I love my red toenails.  I love the flowers on my table.  I love my black strappy sandals with a love that is deep and pure.  

For a long time, I believed that this was a terrible flaw in me.  I tried to hide it as best as I could.  (I failed.)  I was sure that my swooning adoration of all things lovely and graceful was proof that I was a heartless, greedy, materialistic, indulgent, lustful, shallow person.

Here were my rules: 

You can’t care about starving children and also crave satin high-heeled shoes.  

You can’t be deep and soulful and also delight in the perfect pleat in a sculptured linen dress. 

You can’t be wise and savvy and also dream of owning a $9000 ottoman one day just because it has the most cunning little buttons. 

You can’t be an intellectual and also want pink flowered curtains.  

I so wanted to be good and do good, to help and not to hurt.  For a long time, I thought that meant hair shirts, or at least Birkenstocks.  Many of the enlightened souls I met had eschewed one form or another of ‘worldly vanity,’ whether that meant that they ate lots of tempeh and always recycled, or they sold their empires and gave the money to charity.   

So I believed my rules, even though every time I told myself that I shouldn’t love lovely things, I felt a deep stab of sadness.  My rules hurt.  They bound me in a situation where no matter how hard I worked, I just could not win.  

Because oh, I love beauty. 

I love beautiful clothes.  Exquisite shoes.  Subtle champagnes.  Bloomy blossoms.  Outrageous art.  Luscious lipsticks.  Velvet couches.  Shiny sailboats.  

And as long as I used that love as a yardstick to measure myself and find myself wanting, I’d turn around and use it to whack myself in my own mind.  Whack, whack.  

It was awful. 

And it was even more awful because every time I thought about it, I’d writhe in embarrassment at having such pampered, privileged worries.  What about the god-damn starving children?!??   

Later, as I explored my own shame around this longing for beauty, I was shocked to see how long I’d held onto my rules even though were ludicrous… and painful.  I was afraid that if I didn’t temper myself and tamp down this wild hunger in me, I’d go out and do something dangerous, something crazy.  (Something like, you know, go be an actress or a life coach or a writer.)  I’ve let go of that shame, thank heaven, with the benevolent crowbar of excellent coaching.   It was a revelation when my coaches would just start laughing uncontrollably as I told them my sad, sad beliefs about all the terrible things it meant that I so loved things of beauty.  

It’s hilarious to me now too.  Because the truth is, this love for beauty came into the world with me.  It’s woven into so many parts of who I am!  Being ashamed of it was a deep form of self-abuse.  

I’m the little girl who wept because the pink rosebud curtains were so beautiful, and who spent hours in utter bliss cutting out tiny, intricate designs out of paper.  I’m the adolescent who would pick up the simplest, plainest frock on the rack and see that it cost twice as much as anything else in the store.  I’m the young woman who wanted to go to the college with spires, fountains, and trails of glory.  

I judged myself so harshly for this. 

Shallow.  

Greedy.  

Spoiled. 

Never satisfied.  

Has to have the most expensive thing. 

Champagne tastes and a beer budget.  

Those judgments make me laugh now, but they hurt me cruelly back in the day.  More truthfully, I hurt myself in my own mind because I believed that they were true.  I lashed myself with these thoughts until I was raw and despairing.  Now that those beliefs seem so ludicrous to me, you could tell me I’m greedy and shallow right to my face and I’d think you had some issues, but it really wouldn’t hurt me.  

Listen.  I’m still the woman who walks into stores and picks up the most expensive item, with an unerring and unwitting instinct.  I still groan at the price tags of the things that I am drawn to.  

But this same instinct also means that I can spot things: the item that will become the season favorite, the heirloom in the junk store, and the possibility in most unlikely materials.   I can take a hundred dollars and make it look like a thousand.  I can throw together outfits, rooms, and photographs that satisfy my own deepest hunger.  

And now I finally know that this aspect of me that I felt so much shame over is one of my great gifts.  My deep hunger for beauty pushed me to learn how to train my disorganization and innate messiness so that I could create orderly, graceful spaces for myself.  My deep delight in art leads me to create: blogs, poems, essays, coaching programs, and domestic tableaus.  My eye for diamonds in the rough helps me spot the beauty in my clients that no one else in their lives can see.  

I wouldn’t give it up for anything.