Cheslie Kryst at 30: an essay as an unheard and unseen cry for help
When the media referenced recently passed former Miss USA winner Cheslie Kryst’s essay, “A Pageant Queen Reflects on Turning 30”, published in Allure on May 4, 2021, I thought it was just a sentence or two that commented on American society’s view of aging: “…turning 30 feels like a cold reminder that I’m running out of time to matter in society’s eyes,” was repeated often. But reading the whole essay now, I see that this was more than a commentary on America’s obsession with youthfulness. The opening sentence, “Each time I say, ‘I’m turning 30,’ I cringe a little…” with hindsight, now reads like a warning sign, if not a cry for help. A red flag now, a light red flag then. The closing sentence, “Now, I enter year 30 searching for joy and purpose on my own terms…” suggests hope, but 11 months later, I ask what happened to that joy, that discovery?
Cheslie Kryst, beauty pageant winner, attorney and correspondent for Extra, committed suicide, according to the coroner’s report, by jumping to her death from her high rise apartment building. She posted to Instagram, on the day she died, the photo above with the caption, “May this day bring you rest and peace ❤.”️ Was this a warning sign, a foreshadowing, expecting a response with “rest in peace?”
Her Allure essay is a description of her burden at fitting in despite having achievements that many would envy, if not desire to aspire towards. More than a youth-obsessed nation, America is also beauty-obsessed. Through the prism of a Eurocentric definition of beauty, Cheslie was acknowledged by all the important voices as beautiful. Trolls online don’t see beauty, in anything. That famous line from here in the Caribbean, directed to such people, springs to mind: “If you see God face, you will still find fault with it.”
Smart, beautiful, and getting into the right places within the important entertainment industry, her future looked bright from my angle. So what was missing? Were brains and beauty not enough to make it? One thing I never heard was who was her significant other. Was that a missing clue to this whole story that reveals the third wheel in the American ideal triumvirate: family? Like many American families, her parents divorced when she was young. She had many siblings. Family should not have been a problem, but coupling is seen as an expected right of passage in America. (Un-coupling is becoming a right of passage too in the U.S. The U.S. has one of the highest crude divorce rates in the world with the last reported national average of 2.7 per 1,000 people!)
Do we as a larger society, here and there, have to learn how to decode deeper meaning from clues given on the public face of our friends and colleagues? In Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean and the wider Americas, all is not the same socially or even historically, but the few commonalities could tie us together so that we as a people can be our brother’s and sister’s keepers, so that we as a people can be guardians at the gate signalling to all who need to hear it, that “we got you.”
The new ways of seeing and deciphering problems in a socially connected, instant communication world compels us, I believe, to say something sooner. The cliché “sharing is caring” has merit, more so now. This sad denouement to Cheslie’s life story is a signal for readers and listeners to see and speak up, and if possible, to pull our friends back from the brink.
© 2022, Nigel A. Campbell. All Rights Reserved.
