Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self

I feel as though all the authors from our short readings would agree on the fact that we have multiple inner beings of ourselves. With each story we were able to identify the changes of the author throughout the story. When I listened to Jill Bolte Taylor, she portrays a sense of nirvana and reaching a peaceful state internally. Here we are able to see the right side and left side brain of Jill Bolte Taylor. With the short story, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self”, we are able to see the quick change in self-confidence the author has. Alice Walker, starts out as a confident beautiful girl until her accident, she then becomes increasingly aware that she no longer lifts her head or feels herself anymore. While growing up she is made fun of and her self-esteem lowers throughout the year. She begins to question her self-image and how people see her, she frequently asks her family if they think she has changed to. Her family sees her no different though, but her view of herself is no longer then beautiful girl she once felt. When the author questions her changing self it tied in with the reading “First Person Plural”, the author, Paul Bloom, says that “many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another”. The way I perceived this, was that sometimes the misery we have in our lives are usually caused by our inner being thoughts we create for ourselves. It shows how the way we see ourselves can be much different from the way others around us may see us. At the end of the story “Beauty: When the Other Dance Is the Self”, Alice Walker, has a daughter and her view of herself quickly begins to change again. She worries that her daughter will look at her and question what is wrong with her eye. This continually pops into the authors mind until one day while she is standing over her baby’s crib her daughter looks up and says, “Mommy, there’s a world in your eye”, hearing those words gives the author a sense of comfort. She is relieved that her eye is seen as beauty to her child, when she saw her eye as a worthless part of her. Her perception on herself begins to change once again.