Dear Girl in the Elevator,

I love you for wearing your hair in a sleek, practical ponytail, and looking like you just couldn’t be bothered to blow-dry and style your hair this morning. I love you for wearing that tight, below-the-knee midi skirt on your petite and curvy frame; for wearing that very skirt with flats and not heels, chopping your leg line and not at all elongating your short, sturdy calves, making it clear to the world that like hell you were walking multiple blocks to work in anything else but. I love you for wearing a solid color on top and print on the bottom, for emphasizing those gorgeous, full hips even more and not trying to visually balance out the silhouette of your body’s true proportions. I love you for defying standard figure-flattery advice in your own subtle way, for breaking fashion rules with style, for looking like you don’t give a shit, yet still somehow looking like you damn well might take over the world in all your classic black-and-gray. I love you even if you didn’t do this on purpose; in fact, I think I love you all the more for that.

I love you most of all for not conceding to please my eye in as many ways as possible. For challenging it. Because you see, here is what I know about my eye: It has been trained by society to only see beauty in very particular, acceptable ways. But I have fought against my training, because this is what I have come to profoundly understand: Beauty is so much more than what is merely conventional, symmetrical, and proportional; it is more than what we have been taught to like by every implicit and explicit message we internalize from our environments; it is more than what simply follows the rule of thirds and Da Vinci’s golden ratio.

No, beauty is always where you choose to see it. Where you choose to look for it. It is entirely individual and situational, it is a reflection of the values you have absorbed and chosen from the kind of life you have lived, it is a quality that cannot be quantified into a paltry system of 1–10, yes-or-no, hot-or-not, swipe-right-or-left. Because the possibilities of beauty are too vast and grand to fit into any of these pitifully small scales. Because I’ve learned to value what is different and individual and true more than what is deemed better simply because it is deemed more attractive by other people. Because better is a subjective reality, just as attractive is a subjective quality. Because sometimes attractive is only what we’ve always known to be attractive, or what we’ve simply been told to be attractive. Because society may have taught my eye to see only some kinds of beauty, but I have fought long and hard to teach my eye, to teach myself, to look for more beauty, more beauty always. And for fifteen seconds, I found so much beauty in you. Imagine what more I could find in a day. Imagine what more I could find in a month. Imagine what more someone else could find within you in a lifetime, if they just kept looking. Looking for beauty, more beauty in you. More beauty always.

Girl in the Elevator, you made my day and you didn’t even know it. Thank you for sharing my space. And perhaps more importantly, in a world where we women are taught to exist in as little room as possible, in a world where we are taught to value ourselves based on how well we measure up to someone else’s checklist of what is appropriate and feminine and beautiful, in a world that has been, and is still working ever so hard just to keep us in our place—from the bottom of my heart, Girl in the Elevator: Thank you taking up your space. Thank you for taking your place.