Our Looks/Our Lives: Sex, Beauty, Power, and the Need to Be Seen | 
If the powerful forces of beauty and envy aren't confronted, their sting is not removed, and denial becomes a way of life; power is traded on, pain inflicted, all actions and intentions called by names other than what they really are.
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Raised to deny the power of beauty, we must also deny the envy that rides alongside it.
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As Freud once remarked to a patient -- and I paraphrase -- "I can understand this misadventure happening once, even twice, but at some point your own involvement in your unhappiness must be questioned."
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If our dark side isn't recognized early, how then consciously to decide whether or not to act on malice or to temper the nasty emotion? Fairy tales abound with heroes and heroines who must choose. So must the child.
My takeaway: KNOW THY ENEMY -- EVEN (AND ESPECIALLY) IF THY ENEMY IS YOURSELF
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We [even] envy the power we have given to our beloved to make us happy or sad, the power that he or she has to take their beauty and bestow it on anther. Hating the power they have over us, we leave them for another. There is no constancy. There is no gratitude, and without gratitude, says Melanie Klein, there is no love.
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This book is so enlightening!! 97 pages in, already so many passages underlined 😬👆
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The feeling of dependency that is a part of love is only sweet when we have the ability to walk away and return to a state of self after our needs have been met, as in deeply satisfying sex. If there is no sense of self and the beloved is felt to have all the power...
There can be no love until gratitude is learned. It is gratitude that opens the door to love.
To be seen instead as someone else's projection of what they would like us to be is deeply unsettling because it is not us. To be ignored is to feel invisible.
Ambivalence explains so much of life. As in, I love you, I hate you. As in, how much to show, how much to let another see of one's needs, one's naked self. What bliss to show all and be adored; what agony to be judged, then abandoned after having revealed so much of one's fragile self. Better to show nothing. But then, who would have seen us?
See me or I won't even know I exist.
We spend our lives going from one pair of eyes to another, one set of expectations to the next, looking for ourselves until one day, if we are lucky, we stop and decide to look inside, where, indeed, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
