Beauty: it isn’t everything, it’s in the eye of the beholder, it’s not skin deep. These are all examples of lies I allowed myself to be deluded by until the fateful moment last week when I looked at a picture of actor, singer, and model Zoë Kravitz.

Guided or pushed by external forces though we may be, life’s greatest moments of clarity are always the result of our own actions. It is in this sense that I can claim agency in my downfall, to bittersweetly assert that my undoing was… my doing, by which I mean that I decided, unprompted, to Google image ‘Zoë Kravitz face’ earlier.

Milliseconds after I laid eyes upon her biochemically perfect visage I realized that the platitudes of inner beauty I had clung to since girlhood were nothing more than shoddily constructed life rafts in a sea of flawless, gently-freckled truth, and so swiftly did Zoë Kravitz’s cheekbones pierce those rafts that I was left in the open ocean, barking out lyrics to “Beautiful Soul” while saltwater filled my mouth.

Well, guess what? Jesse McCartney lied to us.

Now I may not know much about anything, but I do know that because of the Golden Ratio there is one thing that science and God agree on: aesthetic perfection exists as a rule of the universe, and that rule is actually based on Zoë Kravitz’s face.

To be alive at the same time as the most historically significant figure to date (sorry, Jesus) is humbling, and also earth-shattering. Every aspect of my life has been thrown into a vortex of chaos.

For instance, I used to fancy myself a 6 (or 8 with a blowout) but I now realize on a scale that includes Zoë Kravitz I am, technically speaking, a negative 37.

And what of my boyfriend who has often told me that I’m beautiful? Can I deal with the fact that I am dating an idiot? Now when he tells me I’m beautiful I say, “No, babe, Zoë Kravitz is beautiful. She is beauty, and ne’er existed t’other,” which he seems to not like probably because men hate being corrected.

To put it bluntly, looking at a picture of Zoë Kravitz destroyed my life, but it also set me free. While I firmly know that if my face were her face I would have no problems and everything would be perfect and easy, I also know it’s not my truth, so I’m going to stop spending money on good moisturizer now and retire.

Cheers!