Around eight in the evening, I wrap up my toddler’s bedtime story and tell him it’s time to call Tata and Pati – his grandfather and grandmother, as they’re called in Tamil.

The routine is the same every night. My father answers my WhatsApp call and shouts across the room to my mother: “Come, talk to the children!” It’s already dawn in Bangalore, India, where my parents live. My mother’s standing a foot away from the television, watching a live devotional broadcast from a Hindu temple. She needs glasses but never wears them, so she hunches toward the screen, eyes squinted. When my father calls again, she acquiesces and hobbles over to the phone as my father holds it out.

“Show me your toy – what toy you have today?” she asks my four-year-old in English. He hoists his latest Lego creation. Today it’s a spaceship with a red wing on one side and a blue one on the other. “Mmm, very nice, very nice,” she says as he describes what it is. For three, maybe four seconds, her eyes catch light, as if a window somewhere inside her has opened. Then the shadows return. She turns away and tells my father in Tamil, “OK, take it away, take it away,” and goes back to the TV. We’ll try again tomorrow.

If you had asked me when I was my son’s age what beauty was, I would have pointed to my mother. In a photo from when I was four, I’m standing next to her, holding my green bicycle. I can still feel her running beside me in the desert heat of Oman, where I grew up: one hand on the tall sissy bar, steadying the bike and laughing as I finally figure out how to balance myself without training wheels. It’s one of my only memories of her being plainly, effortlessly happy. In another photo from those years, I’m standing on the couch and kissing her cheek while she beams at the camera. But I have no memory of that moment, or of ever having kissed her. Those kinds of moments would soon disappear as my mother became severely mentally ill. And as her schizophrenia progressed, untreated, what changed was not only her, but also the way I processed beauty.

There are two types of beauty. One is what I would call scripted beauty. This is the beauty for which we have cultural scripts – the kind we recognize and reward. We see it in physical attractiveness, beautiful objects, in picture-perfect homes with doting couples and smiling family photos. Scripted beauty doesn’t have to be superficial; it can be laden with meaning and yearning, and its absence in one’s life can feel oppressive. The second is what I call revealed beauty – the kind that usually remains obscured, yet sometimes discloses itself unbidden in moments of radiance and recognition where something surprising breaks through.

It matters to be able to tell these two kinds of beauty apart. Scripted beauty has its place – it helps us stick to shared norms and orders our lives. But if we stop there, we confuse beauty with conformity. We end up wounding those who can’t follow the scripts, and become oblivious to their beauty. The full worth of a person is never evident on the surface; it remains obscured from our eyes. And in chasing after scripted beauty, we lose sight of this deeper kind. We don’t know how to look for it – we may not even realize it is there.

My mother, over a few short years, went from working as a physician to spending her days alone at home, gripped by a fierce worry, scanning the room with the intensity of someone who senses an enemy nearby, spending hours speaking to invisible presences. I never learned what triggered her illness. Her night shifts working alone at the hospital probably didn’t help; she resigned when I was six. Perhaps it was the long days subsequently spent alone at home, without extended family and friends, without the scaffolding of language and custom. Life in Oman as a guest worker can make anyone anxious – you’re always a foreigner, never at home, your visa one capricious administrative decision away from being canceled, forcing your return to a home country where stable work is even more precarious. Genetics, neurochemistry, and other unknown stresses were likely at work, but I didn’t know any of this, and couldn’t have seen it from the outside.

If you had asked me when I was my son’s age what beauty was, I would have pointed to my mother.

It probably didn’t help that we were Brahmins, the highest rung in the Indian caste system. In our world, the mind was everything. Leading a respectable life meant becoming a physician, an engineer, a scientist. Here was another form of scripted beauty: you were supposed to excel in mathematics, to prove the power of reason. My mother’s proudest accomplishment was the gold medal she won for topping her class in medical school. That was the kind her community knew how to admire. It featured prominently in the classified advertisement her family placed in the newspaper to elicit marriage proposals. But what happens to your worth, to your beauty, when you lose your mind?

One afternoon, I came home from school to find her shouting at an invisible visitor. A magician had appeared in our flat, she said, and he was responsible for making my father lose his job. She spoke to him in Tamil and English, eyes wide, lips tense. When my father suggested seeing a psychiatrist, she flared with blazing eyes: “You think I am mad? I am a doctor! Gold medalist!”

I was unaware that anosognosia – the inability to recognize one’s own illness – is a common feature of schizophrenia. To me it just seemed like stubborn denial, which only deepened my frustration. My own speech hardened into contempt and curses. I had decided that the woman in front of me was a problem to be managed, and resented her – and my father for not hospitalizing her.

The Bollywood movies my mother regularly watched presented mothers as tender and self-sacrificing, feeding their sons with radiant affection. I fantasized what it would be like to grow up in a home where friends were invited in, where you could feel you belonged. My friends’ mothers greeted us with warmth, and drew us into their orderly living rooms. “Come, come, sit,” a friend’s mother sang out as she set out a real meal on a dining table, where the family – unlike ours – ate together. It was the beauty of a hospitality that was recognizable and expected, and one that was absent in my home. My mother scowled and grumbled when she fed me; she ate in the kitchen by herself, standing hunched over the counter, muttering to herself. None of this fit the script. And so, none of it was beautiful, and it repelled me, producing shame and disgust.

That disgust wasn’t only my response to my mother; it became a way of reading myself. If beauty was the condition for belonging, then its absence meant exclusion and rejection. I learned to recoil not just from her but from what I feared I might become, and eventually from anything in me that didn’t match the script. The standards I used to judge her became the ones I applied to myself.

Our appearance-obsessed culture trains us to measure ourselves and others by very particular forms of beauty – at the cost of health, freedom, and even love.

This further fueled my resentment toward my mother. Had she only fit the scripts of hospitality and affection, I convinced myself, I could have been more popular in class. Nothing wrong with a tidy room or a welcoming host – in many homes those are the first languages of beauty. But I used those standards to punish the person whom they no longer fit. Presentability became the conditional price of love.

One way this form of beauty infects society is through what psychologist Renee Engeln calls “beauty sickness.” Our appearance-obsessed culture trains us to measure ourselves and others by very particular forms of beauty – at the cost of health, freedom, and even love. Engeln’s research focuses on the effects of beauty standards on women, but I saw the same mechanism at work in my own life. Such standards, Engeln shows, are often reinforced not just by media but by family members when judging their spouses and children. In my own home, I measured my mother by the scripts she could no longer perform. When beauty is reduced to what is legible only through our scripts, we spend our energy scrutinizing what is on the surface and lose the capacity to perceive a person’s worth.

My father and my younger brother, by contrast, never seemed to wrestle with this blindness. Somehow, they were able to recognize in my mother a beauty that I could not see. I don’t know why it came more easily for them – whether temperament, habit, or grace. For me, it took a conversion.

Shortly before I turned nineteen, through an unexpected confluence of events, I became a Christian. It is too complicated a story to tell here. But it opened me to a new kind of beauty that is not scripted. What I call revealed beauty is this radiance – the way reality shines forth as what it truly is.

I encountered this kind of beauty through people and experiences that unsettled my old criteria for scripted beauty: a mentor in church who saw in me more value than I could see in myself; learning about Mother Teresa, who could look at the poorest of the poor and see Jesus; volunteering at L’Arche communities and befriending people with developmental disabilities in whom I met an undeniable joy and dignity. Becoming Christian entailed the recognition that my worth did not lie in performance, polish, or conventionally scripted beauty. Rather, it was given – by Someone who loved me and beheld me as beautiful. And if that was true of me, then it was true of my mother. To accept that God delighted in me was to accept that she was just as precious in his eyes, regardless of her capacities. As a result, I began, slowly, to see my mother differently, and learned to find in her another kind of beauty.

Thomas Aquinas identifies radiance or claritas as a key criterion of beauty: the splendor of an object that makes its inner essence intelligible. A psychiatrist recently told me that this concept aptly describes where she finds beauty in her work, in moments when she recognizes the flickers of personhood that illness can’t erase – the brief glances and gestures when her client’s true personality shines through. It’s not the clarity of order or perfection, but that of beholding the person beneath the symptom. And it’s truly something to delight in.

My mother was only diagnosed about ten years after the onset of her illness, when my father managed to trick her into a hospital visit. But the medications intended to help her mind ended up wreaking havoc on her stomach. After years of failed attempts, her psychiatrist concluded that my mother’s life would be happier without medication.

Today she cannot hold a conversation for more than half a minute. Even in person, she turns away just as quickly as on the phone. But there are regular moments, such as when my toddler thrusts his latest Lego creation toward the camera, that her face becomes briefly transparent with joy. In those few seconds, her attention – which her illness often engulfs – is given wholly to another person. I suspect in those moments she encounters beauty as well.

Seeing beauty in my mother again is an obligation of attention. It means refusing to make legibility the price of love. It means holding together the facts of her illness and the honor due to her person. That means calling her every day with my children, and even traveling across the oceans on a long and uncomfortable flight once a year, in the hope of an encounter – so that they may see in her not just the strangeness but also the spark.

Scripted beauty is easy to process; it trains us, enchants us, and helps us order our lives. We need it. But we neglect another form of beauty that is more demanding. It may not flatter our expectations and indeed may even offend them. It demands more of our eyes. It arrives unbidden, and asks for patience and humility. It arrives in weakness rather than strength. And perceiving it might require some kind of conversion – whether of faith or of attention.

To value such revealed beauty is to train ourselves to attend to what is easily missed, to wait for the radiance to surface. It is to recognize that presence is more important than presentation.

I used to think beauty had abandoned my mother. But I was wrong. What had disappeared was the scripted beauty I had been trained to look for. Learning to look again has taught me to wait for the revealed beauty that breaks through in her eyes. That beauty has not healed her illness. But it has helped me remember what it means to be her son.