There’s a certain heaviness that comes from not measuring up. It isn’t loud or always visible, but it settles in early, deep in the bones. In A Yellow Rose in Thorn’s Clothing, Lana Lee gives voice to that invisible weight: the beauty standards she never asked for but could never quite escape. The expectations others projected onto her body, her personality, her very being.
And like so many women, she learned to navigate a world that seemed to prefer her smaller, physically, emotionally, and otherwise.
Contents
The Mirror, From the Beginning
Beauty as Currency
Faith and Feminine Approval
The Cost of Conforming
And Still... She Reclaims Herself
Letting Go of the Gaze
A Yellow Rose in Thorn’s Clothing
The Mirror, From the Beginning
Lana’s reflections on her younger years are punctuated by moments where her body became a battleground. At eleven, she writes, “I was skinny… until 7th grade when I got my period and instantly put on twenty pounds. It’s been an uphill battle ever since.” That sentence lands with more than just physical discomfort. It speaks to the sudden shift from being a child who simply was to a girl who needed fixing.
What followed was not just weight gain but an immediate loss of freedom. Adolescence, for Lana, was marked by comparison. To thinner girls. To her more glamorous sister. To the invisible ideal that seemed to hover everywhere she went.
Beauty as Currency
Even as she tried to step into her own life, those comparisons didn’t end. When she started dating, the validation was conditional. “You’re not pretty, and you don’t have a good personality,” her first husband told her. “Men will only be after you for one thing.” It was a parting shot. But it wasn’t the first time she’d been told who she was. Just the cruelest.
In the chapters that follow, Lana documents the long arc of recovering from that sentence. Not just disproving it to others but to herself. In quiet moments, she describes finally getting contacts, learning how to apply makeup, losing weight. Not as celebrations, but as milestones in becoming someone the world would allow in.
The irony, of course, is that once she met society’s criteria for “beauty,” she began attracting the exact type of attention that confirmed her earlier fears. “It wasn’t until I got contacts, lost weight, and wore makeup,” she writes, “that I seemed to attract the kind of men who would be after me for that ‘one thing.’”
Faith and Feminine Approval
At one point, Lana threw herself into church life. It was a space that promised moral worth, not physical perfection. But even there, the judgment lingered. She remembers being humiliated for her weight. One woman from her Singles group offered her hand-me-down clothes she’d “shrunk out of” as if that were an act of grace.
No one asked if Lana liked who she was becoming. They were too busy sculpting her into something she never claimed to be.
The Cost of Conforming
In one particularly heartbreaking moment, Lana recounts tithing 10% of her gross part-time income, even while living on hot dogs and Kraft macaroni. “No matter what I did or how hard I tried,” she writes, “I was never going to be good enough to be the wife of a dedicated Southern Baptist.”
That line, like many in her book, is not bitter. It’s bare. It speaks to the exhaustion of trying to belong to a system that rewards sameness and obedience over individuality and complexity.
And Still... She Reclaims Herself
What makes Lana Lee’s story powerful is not that she triumphed over every insecurity. It’s that she tells the truth. She doesn’t disguise her longing for beauty, for acceptance, for romance. But neither does she allow those longings to define her.
Letting Go of the Gaze
In the end, A Yellow Rose in Thorn’s Clothing is less about transformation and more about reckoning. It asks: Who gets to decide what makes a woman worthy? And how long do we chase an answer that was never meant to include us?
Lana never offers a clean resolution. Instead, she gives the reader something better: evidence that you can live a beautiful life even if you never become what the world says is beautiful.
That weight—the one placed on her shoulders in childhood—is still there. But it’s no longer something she carries alone. In writing this book, she sets some of it down.
A Yellow Rose in Thorn’s Clothing
“I’m not famous. I’m not a celebrity. I’m a normal person like most of you. This book is a record of my memories and experiences from a young child until I was thirty-seven and met my third husband in between. I faced challenges, made some questionable choices, suffered the consequences, and persevered. I’m still here to talk about it. I felt like it was important to share this story as I’m sure many people can relate. I hope to provide encouragement, empathy, and support. None of us are perfect. We’ve all made our mistakes. We may not be forgiven by the general public, but most importantly, we have to forgive ourselves. It is never too late to change the path that we are on, and it is never time to give up. I hope that you find inspiration from this book.”
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