From beauty pageant to losing the "Self"

August 2021, at the height of my beauty pageant days. Moment after I had been crowned with an award for nationals at an international beauty competition.

For the past few years, I have been placing a heavy emphasis on my “self”. 

It was exacerbated over Miss Korea, when everything was about me. My pretty smile, my perfect makeup, my shiny dress, my dazzling jewelry and my big crown. A feigned sense of self importance grows. 

The dating market works in a similar way. In the dating app game, one must showcase themselves to others. It’s a sales pitch on why I’m a great person to date over the endless options you have a swipe away.

When evaluating my self worth and self image, I’ve perpetually over indexed on others’ perception of who I am. The center of gravity for value judgment lied outside of myself in the previous environments I’ve been placed in. Miss Korea is all about looking beautiful in the judges’ terms, not how I judge myself. The name of the game in dating is being a favorable partner for someone else, just as much as it is for you to like them, as it takes two to tango. And being in those environments, you start thinking dominantly about your ego, the self. You become heavily reliant on how you want to be perceived by others, not how you want to be for yourself. 

Placing that emphasis on the self gives a false impression of self importance. Furthermore, as you build up a persona you’d like to mold into, the “self” becomes rigid. You are forced to define yourself in a narrow scope. And, you hold onto that self. 

But in Buddhism, we fundamentally believe that a “self” does not exist. Who is the “self”? Who am “I”? “I”, one year ago, dreamed of working in the media and entertainment space. The “I”, today, is content working in restaurant strategy in tech. “I” tomorrow may want to become an artist. But that is for me to worry about tomorrow — “I” am impermanent. Humans continually change. So who is “me” among these innumerable ever changing egos? Nothing is permanent. Nothing can be held onto. 

And as we are interconnected and interdependent on each other, we continually evolve. We do not exist in a vacuum; we are continually influenced, shaped and molded by the interactions with others. As literary critic Harold Bloom mused, the perennial dilemma of an artist: the “anxiety of influence” cannot be evaded. Similarly, French philosopher Roland Barthes questioned the very possibility of originality and authenticity in his 1967 manifesto The Death of the Author in which he stated that any text was but a tissue of quotations that were themselves references to yet other texts. It’s the same argument for art, that no creation is original but a unique composition that builds on what came before. 

While we have the autonomy to choose who we spend time with and how we want to be influenced to some extent; there is a growing impression of the loss of the degree of freedom due to the “algorithms” we constantly expose ourselves to in this tech saturated world. We lose the integrity of individual, free-willed thinking. It becomes harder to place the value judgment and originality of self within, in this this vast, fast world that continually feeds you what you supposedly prefer. “This is your type, this is your flair” is what the algorithms instill in us. We are prone to become more confused of what the true color within us is as we are faced with more noise.

But again, the self is not rigid. We are ever changing, ever influenced by other as we interact in this dynamic world. It is one thing to know what you like and think today, but another to cage yourself in a narrow definition. It is like a ballerina standing on the tip of her toes if we limit the center of gravity to one dot. But if we plump down, or lie down, and widen the spread of the center of gravity, it becomes easier to maintain the balance. 

At the end, we do not have to expect ourselves to maintain a too narrowly particular and specific shape.