"Beauty Does Not Equal Perfection" with Allison Fallon
“Beauty Does Not Equal Perfection” with Allison Fallon
Have you ever met someone at just the right time? That was the case for me with Allison (Ally) Fallon. Allison is a gifted writing coach, author, and founder of Find Your Voice. She has written over a dozen books, including her most recent title Indestructible: Leveraging Your Broken Heart to Become a Force of Love and Change in the World. I met Ally at a writer’s conference she was hosting in Nashville, Tennessee. There, she brought back to life some pivotal things within me. She reminded me of the power of story and the power of creativity.
In my interview with Ally, she shares a bit about her own story: her experience with heartbreak, surrender, and the beauty she’s found amidst it all.
The Interview
Audio engineering by: McGinty Media
THE INTERVIEW transcript:
Melissa: So, the first question that I like to start off with is the question of how do you define beauty?
Allison: Okay, so let me define, let me give my definition by starting by what I think beauty is not.
Melissa: Yes.
Allison: Because I think oftentimes, beauty gets defined in our culture as perfection, or the two get equated. I don't know that if you asked the average person what is beautiful if they would say perfection is beautiful, but the two so often get used interchangeably. And we look at these images of, if you think of what makes a woman beautiful specifically, you look at images in magazines that have been airbrushed. And they've been literally perfected to the point where there's no blemish, no scar, no fine line, no…nothing that could taint this image of perfection, and that's where the bar is set for beauty. And I don't even like using the word “bar” because it makes it sound like… that's not even how I would define beauty.
I think beauty is something that pulls us in and moves us to something new. So, nature. The feeling that you get when you're in nature and you feel so small and you feel moved. I mean, your heart feels moved. Your soul feels moved. It does something to your physiology, that's beauty.
Or when you're in a museum and you see a piece of art that you're not even sure what it is that you feel when you see it, but you feel something when you see it. Or you see a person, you meet a person, all of a sudden have this experience, whether it's romantic or otherwise, where you meet a person who you don't even know why you're so drawn to them, but you just are drawn to them. You're drawn to them on a level that's beyond the physical. It's not not physical, it's just physical and. So, it's like you might find them physically attractive, but it's also there's something deeper happening.
So, that's how I would define beauty, as something that pulls us in and that moves us to feel something new or to move somewhere different.
And the problem is when we define beauty as perfection, what ends up happening is we get stuck on this rabbit trail of perfecting ourselves. And that can start with the physical, the most obvious is physical, so we do things like Botox, which I mean, to be totally candid, I've done Botox one time. I wanted to know what the hype was, and I had lots of friends who go regularly, and I actually have no judgment for any sort of cosmetic alteration to your physicality.
I don't think there's a right or wrong label that you can put on any of that, but I just want to talk about it for a second because when you talk about Botox to remove the fine lines from your face, I think you can walk down a road where you “perfect” one thing. And then what it reveals when that's perfected is another flaw that needs to be perfected, right? So, then you perfect the next thing and perfect the next thing and perfect the next thing, and there's never a point where you get to where you go, "Everything has been perfected."
So, it's like this rabbit trail and a rat race of ... women, a lot of times, get pulled into this rate race of fix, fix, fix, fix, fix, fix, fix. And my question for women everywhere is, what if it didn't need to be fixed in the first place? Or, what if we could move the impetus for physical improvement from external to internal?
So, for example, you could equate Botox with working out, right? It's like a physical alteration of your physical body. Okay, there's an impetus for working out that's about, can I be sexy to win someone of the opposite sex? And there's also an impetus, can I get my body to a place where, both through mental shifts and through physical shifts, where I'm at peace with how I look? When I see myself in the mirror, I think, “I love my body. This is a great body to be in. What a gift to have this body.” And I think if we're only focusing on the physical or if we're only using external sources as a way to validate or invalidate the physical, what happens is, really quickly we lose touch with our souls.
And we go down this long ... I just was joking with a friend recently about the micro blading of the eyebrows, which is becoming a trend. Oh, it is a trend I guess. And I'm like, "When I was in high school, it was like pluck, pluck, pluck until you barely have any eyebrows left." And I'm like, "Now, we've decided that this is the new beautiful when it comes to ..." who decided? I don't know, someone decided this is the new beautiful. And now, women have to spend a tremendous amount of money and go through a tremendous amount of pain in order to get their eyebrows looking the way that someone decided that they were supposed to look. And I'm like, "I didn't even know until someone told me about this eyebrow situation that I should be insecure about my eyebrows. Now, every time I look in the mirror, I'm insecure about my eyebrows."
So I'm just like, can we be careful? I have no judgment about the micro blading of the eyebrows, and who knows? Maybe I'll micro blade my eyebrows one day. But I just am wondering, can we move the ... can we just think for a second about, how do I feel about my eyebrows? Not, how did someone else tell me how I should feel about my eyebrows? Does that make sense?
Melissa: It makes a lot of sense, yes. Yeah, there are so many good things there. Thank you. Another question I'd like to ask is just that sense of where you see beauty in the world, and you mentioned in people and in nature. Is there anything else that you feel like you'd like to mention around that question of where you see beauty in the world?
Allison: Well, people, nature, art, music. I mean I would include music under art. So, you know…and art is all a reflection of people, too. I don't know, I think that would be the most obvious list that comes to mind, yeah. And I think, I mean, not even just people as in seeing beauty in another person, but also our relationship to those people. I don't know if you've had an experience where you've had a falling out with a friend, and then years pass and you think maybe this will never reconcile. And then something happens to you or to the friend, or there's some sort of experience where you come back together. And it's like this full circle moment where you're like, "I never thought in a million years that we'd be ... I thought that this was the end of the friendship, and then now here we are and something's changed, and so we can have this moment where all of the years that we lost seems to make more sense." And that moment is a moment of transcendent beauty. It's just like, who could've orchestrated this? Or who could have ...
You know, those serendipitous moments where you meet something who you thought, if ... I was just thinking the other day about meeting my boyfriend. I'm like, I couldn't have orchestrated that. The relationship has been such a gift to me, but the circumstances under which we met, I'm like, the odds of us meeting are at the same time really slim, and also inevitable. Do you know what I mean?
Melissa: Yeah, yeah.
Allison: And it's the mystery that's hard to explain and understand, and that to me is really beautiful.
Melissa: Yeah, thank you. That's so good. So, the other thing that I had mentioned a little bit earlier is one of the biggest challenges, I think, is brokenness that we see in the world. In terms of buying into this higher sense of beauty so to speak, or authentic beauty. So, for you, I'm just curious if there's a situation of brokenness that you've undergone in the past or you are undergoing that you want to talk about. And then the second part of that question would be, did you see beauty breaking into the midst of the brokenness? Yeah, you can kind of choose what sequence or how you want to weave those together or not, but yeah.
Allison: Well, so this is really linked to my answer about what I think beauty is. So, the minute that we equate beauty with perfection, I think we lose sight of all the beauty that comes in the reality of life, which is obviously, they're imperfect. Or, you know, it has some character to it. Our lives have character to it. So, things go a way we didn't expect them to go. Relationships are challenging and painful. Life circumstances, things happen to us that we wish hadn't happened, there's pain in the experience, all this stuff. And in the midst of all of that, there is so much beauty. And if we think of beauty as perfection, then we miss all of the beauty that's present in the reality of our lives.
So, a really personal example for me of that is I went through a divorce, it's been about three years ago now. And really, truly, it's not just the divorce that ... it wasn't just brokenness in the divorce, although nobody gets married thinking they're gonna get a divorce. There was a lot of brokenness in the marriage and in the relationship itself. So, in total, there was all this time that I spent with this person with the intention of love on, I would hope, both of our parts. I can't say what his intention was. Then, there's the breaking of the relationship, so the breakup, is of course painful. But all of that time together, if my definition of beauty is perfection and resolution and the opposite of brokenness, I don't know, wholeness, whatever you call that. Then, I miss all of the beauty that has come through this life circumstance I never would have chosen for myself, or even for someone, my worst enemy.
I always say, "I would never wish divorce on my worst enemy." It's an awful experience. It's hard to explain the grief and the loss and the loss of a sense of self, and all of that involved. But there was this moment during the divorce, actually almost a year after the divorce was final, where I had been drinking quite a bit to cope with the pain of losing the life that I thought I wanted. And I kind of knew in the back of my mind that the drinking was problematic, but I also was medicating and wasn't really sure how to live without it.
And there was a night where I went pretty overboard with the drinking, and I mean, I was just at my house by myself, but I decided to light a bonfire in my backyard and to burn all of the stuff that represented our marriage or our partnership. So, I called a friend and invited her over because I was like, "I don't want to burn the house down." And she came over and we lit this bonfire, and I threw in my wedding quilt and my marriage certificate and my old IDs with my old last name on it, and all that kind of stuff. And it was a really beautiful ... it's interesting, the burning of a thing to ashes is, in a strange way, refreshing. It's like, now we get to begin again. So, the symbolism there wasn't lost on me.
Then, I go back into the house. My friend leaves, and I am still quite intoxicated, so I become convinced that my house is haunted with evil spirits or something. And so then I'm just like, I have this moment where I'm trying so hard to figure out where God is, you know? And I'm trying all these things, I'm anointing doors in my house with oil. I grew up in the church in an evangelical context, so I'm trying to pull all these old things that I knew or heard or learned or whatever into this new life that I have. But it was really, the entire experience was this flailing, desperate attempt to come back to myself.
And I spend all of my energy, and I go upstairs and just basically collapse into my bed. And in that moment, in total collapse, I have this experience where I felt like God, whatever, however you define that, met me in that place and just said, "It's okay. It's not your fault. You did nothing wrong."
And it's not like I did nothing wrong as in I carry no fault, the way that the relationship unfolded, but in the sense that “there is nothing wrong with where you are right now.” That “where you are is exactly where you are meant to be…and here I am, right here with you. It's the only place I could ever meet you at the end of yourself.”
So, and it wasn't like I heard that audible voice, but it was a sensation of being met in what I felt like was my ugliest place, my most desperate place. And there was just this peace that came over me…So, and that's just one image, but I could tell you a dozen or five dozen other stories like that from my life of moments when you think you've come to the end of yourself, is the best way to say it.
For most of us, given the access, privilege, power, money we have in the first world, most of us can make something really great out of our lives, and really beautiful out of our lives, right? We can put our hands to work and get to work, and we've got intelligence, we've got access, money, power, all those things I listed. And that's great, but when you can't access those things or when those things don't get you where you wanted to go and your ego can't get the acknowledgement that you did it, then it's like you have this moment of, it's beautiful even though it isn't perfect.
It's beautiful even though it didn't turn out how I thought it was gonna turn out. There's a peace that comes with that that it's like it relaxes you into your life in a way that your ego can't ever do that.
And it's not like the life our ego builds is bad, it's just not as deep or rich as that surrender underneath what my ego is capable of. It's a deeper kind of beauty, I think, a deeper resonance.
So, that's just one example of a way that, in my personal life, I think I've uncovered more beauty out of what I would have called the worst case scenario that I think I've ever could've uncovered if things had gone exactly as I was expecting they would.
Melissa: Yeah. Almost like a beauty in the letting go, kind of.
Allison: Yes, 100%.
Melissa: Yeah, thank you. That's…so many good things there. So, the next question is about if you've had experiences that have transformed your ideas around beauty. So, I feel like that's related and could ... I'll let you answer that however you'd like, because I feel like it could be related to what you just talked about, but ...
Allison: So, experiences that have transformed the way I think about beauty?
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Allison: Let's see.
Melissa: We could back up to, I suppose, another question that sometimes I ask people, and maybe this will kind of get us to this transformation question a little bit better. Would be, just lies about beauty that you've experienced personally. So, you named some that are cultural, and I don't know if you've identified with those as much or not, and maybe your journey around some of the lies that you've bought into. That might be a helpful transition into that next question.
Allison: Yeah. Well, the lie that I find myself so quickly buying into and that I think so many women do, and I can share a few examples of this, is that beauty is ... I don't know if the lie is that beauty is external, but that you can purchase your beauty.
Melissa: Yeah.
Allison: So, I mentioned Botox and micro blading your eyebrows. But the makeup industry, the clothing industry, those are two great examples. The cosmetic industry. They're all industries that are thriving off of our insecurity. So, the problem that they're pitching to us is that you've got a problem. Your skin doesn't look the way it ought to, your wardrobe is lacking, you've got dark circles under your eyes, your eyelashes aren't long enough, whatever it is. Your lips aren't full enough. And the problem with that is that the minute we buy into that, we ... let me just give this example.
So, I was in a Sephora, this was a couple years ago now. I was in a Sephora and there was a sale going on, and there were just tons of people packed into this Sephora, and we're all scrambling to find the right lip gloss or the right whatever. And I just had this moment where it's like I stopped and I looked around at all of the women. It was mostly women who were in there, there were definitely some men. And I just thought, I wonder how all of us ended up here thinking that purchasing this lip gloss is going to make us feel ultimately different about ourselves. A lip gloss will make you feel differently about yourself for a few days, hours really, or maybe days if you're lucky. But at the end of the day, lip gloss runs out or you lose it or you decide you don't like the color as much, or there's some new popular color, or whatever. And all you have at the end of the day is your lips, so ... I have nothing against lip gloss, I wear lip gloss. I'm not putting a value judgment on makeup.
It was like, this frenzy that's happening in the store has actually nothing to do with makeup and everything to do with all of us going, "Am I beautiful? Am I enough? Am I worthy? Do I matter? Can you see me? Am I love? Do I belong?" So, it's this much deeper need.
And my thought was, I wonder what would happen if the need to belong and to feel worthy and to be loved deeply for who we are was met, how would that change the way that we felt about our lip gloss? I don't think it would mean that we never buy lip gloss again, because I really am like, everybody's different. And I can speak from my own experience, I enjoy getting dressed up. I think there's something to be said about buying a new outfit and the way you feel about yourself.
I believe there's something to be said about looking at yourself in the mirror and being like, "I really love the way that I look." But I think that can't be only an external journey, or it only goes an inch deep. It has to be an internal journey as much or more than it's an external journey. And I think most of us, what happens is because, again, we live in first world. We have tons of money, access, and power. We can go to Sephora and spend $60 or $160 or $600, and we don't go bankrupt. So, we do that instead of doing much harder internal, spiritual, emotional mental work around our thoughts and ideas about ourselves.
So, I've now lost track of the original question, but I think that's one of the lies. That's just a lie that we buy into that if I just get this next popular trend, if I get this lip gloss, if I get this thing, then I'm gonna feel really beautiful and I'm gonna feel good about myself. And I just don't ... here's why I don't think it's true, 'cause I've done it.
Melissa: Yeah.
Allison: It doesn't work. It's not a fix, you know what I mean? It can be a gift and an addition to what we're already doing in our souls, but it doesn't fill the thing that we're trying to fill.
Melissa: Yeah. So, almost speaking to that next question of what has transformed or what experiences have transformed your ideas around beauty, almost like the story you just gave, it's almost like 'cause you tried some of the answers around beauty that our culture hands you and realized actually, it's not true. The promises that we're told about in marketing, it's not true. And you've kind of gotten to the end of yourself going down those rabbit trails. Yeah.
Allison: And one more story. Can I share one more story?
Melissa: For sure, yeah.
Allison: So, I was in Cabo San Lucas recently. I spoke at an event there and had to go down for a couple of days. Spent some time by the pool, and it was really fun. And you know, I mean, I'm 35 years old, so I'm not really, I mean, it's all relative…I don't really feel super young. I'm long out of my 20s and my 20-year-old body is gone. And them I'm also not in my 60s or 70s or whatever, so ...
Melissa: Right.
Allison: But you know, you start to notice in your 30s that your body has changed. It's just different to be in a swimsuit, and I'm actually, I've made so much peace with my body. I feel like it's a lifelong journey. I've made so much peace with my body and food and how I eat, and learned to take really good care of myself and all of that. But I'm just noticing as I look in the mirror, I'm like, yeah, my thighs don't look exactly like they used to look. I'm not 20 years old anymore. Having these really real thoughts about ... that I think a lot of women could probably really resonate with.
So, I'm out at the pool and I see this woman who's probably in her 60s, and she's in a swimsuit, a bikini, and she, you know…I'm making judgements here and I'll fully admit that. But just for the sake of the conversation, it looks like she's had some work done. She's had breast implants and her lips have been, she's had some collagen injected into her lips, and actually quite a beautiful woman. And she's in her 60s, too, and so she looks like a woman who's in her 60s at the same time that she has had this cosmetic work done. She's also, your skin changes as you get older and your face looks different, and your body just changes as we age.
And I had the realization, as I was looking at her…all this compassion came over me. I don't know if that's the right word, but the realization was like, nothing protects us from aging. We will all age. So, our skin will change, our face will change, our bodies will change, our boobs will change, our eyes will change or whatever. And throughout your life, you'll gain weight and lose weight and whatever. It's like all this stuff is part of the package deal of being a human being. We come into this world and we leave this world, and you age over time and things change. There's no getting around that. So, you can have all the plastic surgery done that you want and you can do all the work that you want. You can buy all the products that you want and do all the things, whatever. It will not prevent you.
I'm like, this woman who has more ... she has obviously money, access, power, and all the things we talked about to have that kind of work done, and if it made her feel even an even an iota more confident in herself, then by all means. Whatever, people have to make those decisions for themselves. But at the end of the day, you're still in your 60s. You're not in your 30s, you're not in your 20s. I'm in my 30s, not in my 20s. There's no way to be in my 20s again, and soon I won't be in my 30s anymore, and there's no way to not be in my 30s anymore.
So, at some point, we have to either make peace with the fact that we will age and will die, or we go out of this world kicking and screaming. I have watched people do that, and I'm just like, I don't want to go out of this world kicking and screaming. I've got to learn to surrender to the reality of what it means to be a human. And I think actually, when we can do that, you see people, I've had experiences watching people leave this life with a lot of peace. And there's actually so much beauty to that versus gripping onto your youth with every ounce of strength you have and fighting your way to your deathbed, fighting your way on the way out. It's actually really quite painful and heartbreaking to watch someone move through their life journey that way.
So, I think that's what, when I think of how I want to be a woman in the world, I think that's what I want to reach for, and there are 1000 ways that I'm sure, you know, doing it is the hardest thing we could ever do, is surrender to the reality. So, but I think that's what I want to do, is just say, you know, part of being a woman, a human, is my hair is going gray and my skin doesn't look it like it did when I was 15 and that's part of being a human.
So, these decisions about, do I color my hair? Do I get breast implants? Do I micro blade my eyebrows? How much do I spend on makeup? How much do I spend on products? These are all choices we have to make for ourselves, and I actually don't think in the long run they have a huge impact. You can buy all the products in the world and do your soul work, and it isn't any better or worse than someone who says, "Well, I don't wear any makeup. I don't wear a bit of makeup. I've never spent money on that kind of stuff.” I just think those things are just surface-level things, they don't matter. The question is, are we going under the surface, doing work there to make peace with the fact that we are human?
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And it's interesting as you were talking, too, and talking about this idea of surrendering to the process of being human and aging, it almost reminded me of the posture that you described, that surrendering or that letting go in your story earlier around laying in your bed after you've been fighting, and just how we all do that in the process of aging and accepting things like mortality.
Allison: Yes.
Melissa: But just that, I don't know. I am seeing this theme of that letting go and that surrender and the difficulty of that, but then also that authentic peace that can come with it.
Allison: Yeah, yeah. It's good.
Melissa: Thank you so much, Ally. That was amazing. Do you have anything else on this topic that I haven't specifically asked about, or that has been triggered by something else that you named? Or, anything else that you'd like to say about it?
Allison: I do. I would like to give a directive to any women who are out there who are listening who are really struggling with making peace with your own body or you know, for most of us, there's one thing. Maybe there's more than one thing, but for most of us, there's one pressing thing that we feel really insecure about. So, for some women it might be their weight, or for other women it might be their skin, or having chronic breakouts, or maybe you're wishing you could have breast implants or whatever. Botox, all of those things.
And what I'd like to say is when you can ... there's two options. You can either choose to fix what you would call the problem. So, I'm insecure about the size of my boobs, I'm gonna get breast implants. And again, I mean, I'll reiterate over and over again, I don't think ... these things are amoral. So, I just don't think that there's a dividing line, like it's a good thing to get it or a bad thing to get it or whatever.
Melissa: Yeah.
Allison: But when you're thinking about making your choice about whether to do any of those things, you can either fix what you consider the problem, and it puts off the feelings of shame or insecurity, that really uncomfortable feeling that we have as human beings when we have not made peace with a part of our bodies. Or, the other option is you can sit with the shame, the insecurity, the uncertainty, the feeling of unworthiness, unloved-ness, that sort of inexplicable deep, dark pain of that. You can sit with it and let that feeling do the work it's trying to do just to bring you back to a place of true fullness.
So, thinking about my divorce, I wanted to badly for it just to be over. I just wanted to be ... I didn't want to be single. I got married because I wanted to be married, and would've given anything for that problem to be fixed, for a new person to come into my life or whatever. And I'm so glad it wasn't fixed right away because sitting with the pain is what brought me to a place where now, I'm in a place where I have a person in my life who I experience a lot of intimacy, vulnerability, loved-ness with. But it feels like I hold it like this (with open hands) because it's an addition to my life, it's not a "I will die without this thing or this person," it's, "What a value and a gift and a joy it is to have him and the relationship in my life." Not, "If you ever leave me, I will never survive." And so I get to enjoy it instead.
And I think the same is true for our beauty, right?
I would hate for a woman to miss out on really making peace with the part of her body that's causing her pain, and instead to feel like she's tied to ... I mean, think of the number of women in our culture who are charging on credit cards things like cosmetics and cosmetic surgery, because we've believed this lie that we're not, you know, you're okay exactly the way we are.
So, wear makeup, color your hair, buy clothes, all those things. There's nothing wrong with any of that. But also be willing to sit with yourself in those moments of…for example, “the holidays just passed, and none of my clothes fit. I feel awful about myself. I feel disgusted with myself.” Can I sit with that feeling of disgust and let it…like offer it some compassion and some love instead of immediately going out to fix the problem by buying something that might make you feel better for a few minutes? Can I give that feeling a little bit of compassion and let it come to a place of fullness, or I just react and go purchase the problem away?
So, that's, I think, a great place for any woman who's listening who's having some of those feelings, that's a great place for her to start, is to think about what's the one thing that I would so quickly fork over my credit card for to fix because I feel so much shame and pain over it? Can I not resolve the problem, and can I sit with the feelings that I feel about myself and offer myself grace and compassion and love and light to that place until I feel like I've made peace with it? That's the last thing I would say.
Melissa: That's awesome. Thank you so much, Ally. I appreciate it so much.
Allison: My pleasure.
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