I too learned a lot of this from my mom, the idea of being able to reject the culture's obsessions with beauty if I wanted to, which I did.

This is really nice to hear throughout these comments, that the society I'm supposed to reject is not a complete monolith against which I'm the only hold out, that there are other people like me. I suppose intellectually I knew that but sometimes I feel very "me against the world" about the whole thing.