I truly felt a connection to Roxane Gay’s text I Once Was Miss America. Her usage of words and mature connections to immature topics created a connection between the reader and the text. When Gay says “I had been to Haiti….so I knew my relatively good fortune was an accident of birth”, that line applies in today's world as well. She brings up the topic of wealth and fortune not being earned, but being luck of where you happened to be born, which is something i truly connect with. Also the entire theme of Roxane Gay wanting to become to next Miss America also had a personal connection with me. Growing up in the pageant world, beauty and grace seems to be narrowed down to one particular type of person. Gay said it best when she says the the Sweet Valley High books created an “unrealistic narrow ideal of beauty” which also applies to the pageant world. In the pageant world, you are pushed beyond your own comfort zone to try to become someone who you are not. You are trying to “outpretty” the other girls around you. By winning the crown, you are somehow deemed better than these other girls, by 3 unknowing and uneducated judges who may have never even talked to you. This ideal shows that by Gay wanting to be Miss America she didn't want to be loved for who she was, but loved for what she looked like, and loved for who else loved her. I think this ideal is common all over the world, but was especially prevalent in my small southern town. The idea that there is only one type of pretty and the obsessive drive to be loved by all was all too often in my life growing up. In the end of the text, when Roxane Gay speaks about her dream of winning the oscar, that is when she decides she would like to be loved for who she truly is and her intelligence and ideas, rather than what she looks like. In the line “This isn't the Miss America crown, but it's pretty damn close”, she shows that being loved for what you look like isn't what she wants anymore. I felt a huge connection with this text because I have gone through the same ordeals of wanting that crown no matter who it made me, but then later on stepping back and realizing life isn't about who thinks youre the prettiest, it's about who you think is the prettiest.
