How I define beauty...

I am going to atempt to describe what beauty is to me. I am blind so beauty as you know it as a sighted individual is a totally different perception, if you will. ?A sighted person can say he or she does not really care how a person looks, that it is what is in their heart that matters, and I believe many folks are sincere about their efforts to see it that way, but your eyes, your vision and the perception that has been imprinted in your mind by the media, books, internet and even your parents when you were a child, strongly affects how and what you will call beautiful.

I did have sight when I was younger, no I never saw 20/20, but I could appreciate beauty. As examples of this was how I viewed my wife and our children, They were physically beautiful to me, and that beauty was obvious to anyone looking at them. So in that case the outer appearance was genuinely beautiful. There was no need to exert too much effort to view certain people as beautiful just by their appearance, and I believe that for sighted people it has not changed much. When a man sees a beautiful woman, he takes notice and no one needs to rienforce what he can clearly see with the naked eye. The same holds true for a woman who sees a handsome man.

I have reached a very interesting point in my life. I have entered the 55th. year of my life. And I have been unable to see faces, so with that the ability to see outward appearance and it's beauty,for the last 22 years. Was it difficult for me at the start? You bet it was! I still viewed those I new to be beautiful as such, but when I expressed my acknowledgement of such beauty it was not accepted based on the persons perception and understandin I no longer could see their features. So in fact they felt I had no knowledge of their beauty. This was very difficult for me since I wanted my then wife to believe me when I told her she looked beautiful. You see we are raised to want others to notice a new item of clothing, a new hairstyle, a new weight, and so on. There is nothing wrong with wanting and needing to be noticed.

As a blind man however, I do see beauty. I believe I see beauty better than when I could actually see. All the clothing, make-up, hairstyle or gain or loss of weight, do not affect how I view a person. You see, I now put much effort in listening to what and how a person expresses their thoughts and feelings. It is like when you read a book and fall in love with the main character, you have a mentalt picture of what you believe he or she looks like. You may never get the opportunity to see that person in real life, but what if you did and they did not live up to your expectations? You see, when I view a person as beautiful, their outward appearance can not change that for me. They could be exactly as I picture them to be or totally the opposite, but to me they are one and the same. While you may be dissapointed in who your beautiful character turned out to look like, that never enters the equation in my determination of how beautiful I percieve, or if you will, see a person. I actually can see a man as a very beautiful person much quicker than a sighted man can. Not only because a man for the most part does not feel inclined to look for beauty in another man, physical beauty that is, this hinders his ability to see the inner beauty. This actually works in reverse when a man sees a beautiful woman, he may be so blinded by her outward appearance that he fails to see how rotten, or ugly she really is as a person. So you see where I have an advantage over you? Can I be fooled? absolutely, I can label a person as beautiful only to find out they are no good. But at least I was not fooled by outward appearance. The amount of time and energy put into looking beautiful does not go unnoticed by a blind person. I care of how I look and I appreciate it when a person does something special so that I may notice them, for example if a woman takes the time to get dressed up for me and wears a nice perfume I deeply appreciate it, you see she is putting aside all those misconcieved ideas that I cannot appreciate her beauty cause I cannot see her with the naked eye. All that is missing is a ssimple discription of her article of clothing, such as the color and length of her dress the style and color of her shoes or boots, and even the way she is wearing her hair that day. These are the things she would want me to notice if I could see. A man with sight may not notice all these details and she will definitely notice he did not. So by my asking what she is wearing I am showin much more interest than he who could see it all. As a blind man I have learned not to take anything or anyone for granted.

While a man may notice his girlfriend is looking good, he may figure she already knows he noticed her so he may not express himself, and this is viewed by her as him not caring enough to notice how she went to such time and effort to look good for him. This very girl or woman may walk by me and I will acknowledge the scent of her perfume, and even though I can't see her she feels I noticed her and paid more attention to her then her own man did.

I am not saying that being blind is a good thing, I am not saying that I would not trade places with a sighted man in a second, all I am stating is how I as a blind man sees beauty, how in fact beauty does rest on the eye of the beholder, whether blind or not...