There are little girls in this world who are taught at the knees of their mothers and grandmothers, how to be beautiful. There are little girls who hear the secrets of grace, elegance, and self-confidence taught to them alongside the reminders to brush their teeth and make their beds. There are little girls who learn how to seem mysterious and beautiful no matter what their faces look like, and these girls embody it so completely that their physical flaws are seen as exotic marks of beauty.

I was not one of these girls.

Growing up, my clothes came from hand-me-down bags and were chosen only for minimum expense and adequate modesty. I was lumpy and rumpled and stained and never knew why I was different, just that I was. My hair was cut short because that was easier than teaching me to brush it. I was a slob, and everything I owned was trashy because I did not know how to take care of my things. I was selfish and self-centered and had a hard time maintaining friendships because I did not understand how to behave.

I knew that I wanted to be beautiful, to be elegant and graceful, to be confident and capable, to be a rare creature that others admired, but I did not have the first clue as to how achieve that.

I started by assuming that all my problems stemmed from my extra ten or twenty pounds of baby fat. I don’t want to even talk about the lengths I went, to try to lose that weight. I did not understand about treating one’s body with respect and nurturing it. But even through all the mistakes that I made, I continued to search for the key to being truly beautiful. Not just the beauty that a plastic surgeon can create or that some people are born with, but that essence that permeates a woman’s every action. What the French call “je ne sai quoi”, the indescribable something.

For years and years I’ve searched, and bit by bit I’ve started putting the pieces together from here and there. I’ve also found that it is not enough to know the secrets. One must apply them or they are useless.

Have I become that woman that I’ve always wanted to be? Not yet, but I finally understand the basic teachings that those few lucky girls started out with. Now the task is simply implementing these things and creating that new life. That is the project that I am working on, week by week.

This blog exists because I realized that there must be other women out there who feel the same way, and who don’t know what to do about it. It seems a waste to spend years and years searching and learning, and then have only one person benefit from it.

Most of us don’t have the money to go to finishing school or hire an exotic European woman to follow us around and teach us the secrets to being one of those rare beauties. We have nothing more than desire and determination.

As long as we have the secrets in hand, that is all we need.