#85: Autumn Christian

"We value beauty because beauty is a signifier of a creature full of life."

Autumn Christian (@teachrobotslove) is the author of Girl Like A Bomb (Clash Books) and The Crooked God Machine. She writes the Substack, Teach Robots Love.

#84: Autumn Christian
Kingfisher, Oklahoma

What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?

I don’t care about being healthy. I care about being beautiful. It just turns out they are, in almost every instance, the same thing. If I could become more attractive by eating pizza, smoking cigarettes, and sinking down into the center of my couch, I’d do it. It just turns out that aspiring toward health is the way to accomplish this. We value beauty because beauty is a signifier of a creature full of life.

And isn’t it so much more fun to say that you want to be “beautiful,” vs. saying you want to be “healthy”? Healthy sounds like getting a regular colonoscopy and taking a spreadsheet’s worth of vitamins. It’s avoiding death with little rituals of frantic clinging to a heartbeat — and is that heart even worth keeping? But beauty? Beauty is the thing that kings covet and knights die for. It’s the treasure hidden in the Ark of the Covenant. It’s the gold threaded through the eyes of a happy woman when she glances up and looks at you and the light illuminates her.