Outside the Dream

Beauty, Desire, Capitalism and Spiritual Survival

I learned early that beauty wasn’t neutral. Beauty was a weapon and a gate. A passport to a world where love, respect, and safety were given freely — but only to those who met its terms. Those terms were never set by me.

In my family, beauty had its own logic. My Aunt Louise — dark-skinned, broad-featured, unapologetically herself — was called beautiful without hesitation. Her beauty was affirmed in living rooms, at backyard barbecues, in the quiet approval of my elders. But I never saw her beauty reflected on television, in movies, or in glossy magazines. There, beauty was pale, straight-haired, slim-nosed, often blonde. Public beauty and community beauty existed in parallel worlds — and one world had the power to define the other as inferior.

At first, I thought I could live in both. I watched white teen movies in the early 2000s — Can’t Hardly Wait, She’s All That, Mean Girls — and imagined slipping into that world, not as myself, but as the token Black friend. Sometimes I tried to make the token role glamorous: blue contact lenses, hair styled like the white boys with spiky gel. I told myself I wasn’t trying to look white, only “exotic.” Exotic Black, I thought, was safer than regular Black. Less threatening. More worthy.

What I didn’t realize then — what bell hooks articulates so precisely in Black Looks: Race and Representation — is that I was negotiating my place inside what she calls “the imperial gaze,” a system where the white imagination sets the terms of worthiness, and everyone else learns to position themselves in relation to it.

After college, depression hit hard. I felt invisible. The most beautiful parts of me — my mind, my spirit, my kindness — were consistently overlooked. In social spaces, the magnetic pull always went toward the “ideal”: usually white, often blond, effortlessly embodying the public dream. Being near them made others feel closer to the fantasy they’d been promised on screens and in ads. Even people who didn’t fit the dream’s criteria would contort themselves to be chosen by someone who did, as if desire from the “ideal” could baptize them into belonging.

I refused. And yet, I was tempted. That’s the thing about dreams sold through mass culture: they are designed to be irresistible, even — maybe especially — to those they exclude. I saw fat gay men openly worship the ideal, Black people speak with awe about white beauty, all as a way of aligning themselves with dominant narratives. This was survival on the dream’s terms — life on its margins, which still felt safer than life outside it.

Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, writes about the “epidermalization” of inferiority — how the colonial system seeps under the skin, shaping not only how we are seen, but how we see ourselves. I felt that truth in my bones. The system didn’t just want my money; it wanted my longing. If it could teach me what to desire — spiky hair, lighter eyes, straighter hair — then it could sell me the promise that love was just on the other side of the next purchase. And if I failed to find love, respect, or acceptance, it meant I had been a bad consumer. My loneliness would be my fault.

That logic nearly killed me.

I turned to spiritual practice because it was the only way I knew to live without constantly bargaining for my worth. Meditation taught me to connect with the part of me that simply exists — not analyzing, not comparing, not performing. Journaling taught me to hear my own voice apart from the voices of advertising, Hollywood, and inherited trauma.

Beauty, for me now, is sacred. It is not the airbrushed perfection of the public dream, but the imperfect grace of weary Black masculine hands. It is my elders’ faces flickering in my niece’s smile. It is the courage of quiet kindness, the power of nurture and protection. I see it in all of us, and I worship it.

And yet — I am still conflicted. I still long for love that is often withheld because I do not live in proximity to the public dream. Not in my physicality. Not in my values. That longing is real, but so is the truth I’ve found: my humanity cannot be measured by a system that depends on my diminishment.

To be free is to step outside the dream — and into consciousness.

But freedom isn’t a one-time escape; it’s a daily refusal. The dream doesn’t just dissolve when you wake up to it — it waits at the edges, whispering through every ad, every curated feed, every casting choice, and “Top 50” most beautiful list. bell hooks warned that “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” is adaptive — it knows how to repackage itself, how to slip into new aesthetics while keeping the same gate.

So my spiritual practice isn’t just personal hygiene for the soul — it’s resistance work. It’s how I make sure the center of my life is not a mall, a casting call, or someone else’s camera. It’s how I keep my longing from being colonized.

And still, I admit: there are days I want to be chosen inside their frame. Days I want someone to call me beautiful in a way that echoes with the same cultural authority that once called Aunt Louise beautiful in our living room — except this time, in the public square. The wanting doesn’t make me weak. It makes me human.

What I know now is that survival — as a dark-skinned, overweight, Black gay man in a world that measures worth by a whitewashed dream—isn’t just about staying alive. It’s about becoming a source of creative, sustaining energy that fosters freedom first in myself, and then radiates outward. It’s about reminding myself and my communities that the only beauty worth having is the kind that is ours to define.

The dream was never made for us. But consciousness? That’s ours. And the more we live there — the more we create there — the more dangerous we become to the systems that profit from our acquiescence.