Beautiful
Tonight, I heard of the passing of former Miss USA 2019, Cheslie Kryst. To start, I want to send my deepest condolences to her family and loved ones. Undoubtedly, this is an enormous loss for the entire pageant community, but just an enormous loss in general, as Cheslie was a person before she was a titleholder. She was not more or less worthy of love and belonging because she was Miss USA. She was worthy because she was a human being. This tragic loss got me thinking, again, about pageants (which, yes, I will continue to write about until I am blue in the face). It had me reflecting on how her death by suicide will forever change the way we look at women in pageantry. Not because all of us are suicidal, but because beauty, grandeur, and achievement still will never be able to mask the glaring dysfunction of the pageant world as a whole: achieve these standards or be in the never-ending rat race that is 'being the best' and the 'most beautiful.' I never knew Cheslie. I