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how it affects you professionally
More than they do for your college acceptances, a lot of people
assume that you've gotten the position at the awesome
company you're at in large part because of your appearance.
These aren't even just strangers — when I was offered a job at
a dream company, my friends' justification for it was that my
future boss had a crush on me. Although I played it off like
it was a joke, that was a devastating blow. I was pretty angry
that they said and thought that AnD that they felt like it was
perfectly acceptable to say, too. I wanted to remind them that
I had been invited to interview at the company before they
had any idea of what I looked like.
one of my friends is the child of a very, very successful
parent. He and I would talk about using his parents' connections
to get his foot in the door for things. His philosophy
was that although it wasn't elegant, it wasn't unthinkable. He
believed that because anyone else in his place would do the
same, it wasn't reprehensible for him to do so. I've occasionally
thought about that and if the same should apply to looks. So
far, to the best of my conscious ability, I have avoided wielding
my attractiveness as a tool for job-hunting.
how it affects you socially
Being both attractive and intelligent is a never-ending source
of stress in high school. You wade between the popular crowd
and the honors kids. It's an uneasy time, because your nerdy
friends desperately despise your popular friends for having
everything they think they want and your popular friends forget
your nerdy friends even exist. Your popular friends are
fun to be with because it's nice to not stand out too much.
When you're only one pretty face in a group of pretty faces,
you belong. But, you can't really party and date the quarterback
if you want to do well in your classes and you really do
want to do well in your classes. So, slowly, you drift to the
smart kids side. You really count on your grades to give you a
sense of worth, because you earned them in a way that you can
never say of your looks.
Post high school, your mixture of looks and intelligence
can still cause social pain. I had a roommate in college who
once offhandedly told me that she would never introduce me
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