We, as a society and as individuals, often hold a very idealized and romantic idea of what beauty is. We gaze into depths of vast landscapes, such as the Grand Canyon and make a testament to its beauty without appreciating the scouring floods and eons of destruction that has gone into caring it. Similarly, we often gaze into people’s eyes or admire the beauty of a person without appreciating the journey which has shaped them. We often view beautiful things as products of several smaller beautiful things holding onto our ideals that beauty must come from beauty. I beg to pose a different perspective, where beauty is shaped from the good and the ugly moments of weakness. I am of course referring to a beauty far deeper than physical appearance. I am referring to a beauty that can only be derived from weak moments where things fall apart.

You could say that the moment a grain of sand becomes dislodged is the breaking point. A time where strong or weak bonds are pulled apart and a piece of the desert is removed, relocated and lost. The breaking point is an event of erosion, a moment of degradation. You could also say that these breaking points help shape and contribute to the beauty of the desert, no canyon would be carved without them, no dunes made.

The thing about it, the breaking point, is the short moment of degradation gives way to eons of beauty. The desert does not dwell on the loss of individual grains of sand. The desert instead embraces their loss and thrives as it grows into its evolved beauty. The Grand Canyon would not exist without eons of erosion and countless “breaking points”.

I am not much unlike the desert, only I lack the wisdom that comes with eons of erosion. I am learning to balance the beauty of what I am while accepting the erosion that continually happens. I know that the Grand Canyon posses a string of beauty that can only exist due to erosion, and I know that the erosion in my life is only contributing to a Grand Beauty that I already posses, and will always posses. I too reach a breaking point, where grains of sand become dislodged. Torn from my person, the erosion prompts evolutionary change that creates more beauty.

I have been dealing with some extreme and frightening anxiety attacks. They have been present for sometime, lurking in the shadows. Weeks can pass where my gait and mood is of extreme and utmost happiness, and then, suddenly, I crash down the side of a mountain. Barreling into a snowball of stress. Sometimes triggered by social situations that have me tense and nervous, other times by work related stress. Once started, I sometimes crawl to the surface for fresh air and escape into reason. Other times I get swallowed by a beast of uncontrollable emotions and overwhelming physical alterations. My breathing becomes rapid with my heartbeat. My hands shake, my mind spins inside my own head. My world becomes engulfed with irrational perceptions in which the things in my head cannot be supported by logic nor fact. I often end up smashing my head on something, hoping to knock it out of me. I spin with the world out of balance, as if balancing on a rod projecting from the Earth so that the force of the world is doing all that it can to knock me down. These feelings can lead to extreme actions, many of which are things I do not want to do, nor have logical explanations as to why I did them. I lose it, I fall down.

In the end, I am learning to visualize the grand beauty that comes from these breaking points. It comes slowly at times, but I am learning to cope. I am seeing the beauty of the desert as gained through the accumulation of all these breaking points. I see the beauty of myself, and welcome and embrace the breaking points in my life as powerful contributors to the beauty of myself.

This is what I mean when I say beauty comes from those ugly moments of weakness, from the breaking points. I do not aim to deny that beauty can emerge from beautiful things, however, I would argue that a much more riveting story surfaces when beauty is derived from a breaking point. We often hold people accountable for weak moments, remain critical of them and expect them to make up for it in some other aspect, but in my opinion, I think by embracing a weak moment as something beautiful and allowing it to freely shape us, we create a world filled with a more powerful and immanence beauty.