The Aftermath of Calling a Girl "Ugly"

When I was a kid, I got bullied a lot. I think it started in second or third grade. I had glasses and crooked teeth and a mole on my chin. It started, at first, with just having glasses. As I got older, my face matured. Then kids in my class found more things to talk about, like my skin or my nose or my lips. I refused to cut my hair anymore after Grade Four, so that I could hide my face.

This is me in Grade Five:

I was small. I weighed sixty lb. forever. I had dimples and spidery hands and brown hair that grew all the way down my tiny spine. Everytime I see this picture, it infuriates me.

When this picture was taken, I was ten years old and thought I was ugly. I look at this picture now and I see that I was not ugly. I only felt ugly, because I was told to feel that way by kids who picked on me and made me miserable. I was ten years old.

High School came and so did puberty... Err, for most girls. I was thirteen and freshfaced. At age fourteen, I was plagued by acne. My mother, horrified her beautiful baby was struck by nature, spent a ridiculous amount of money on moisturizers and masks and creams and ointment and facewash. None of it ever helped much. At fifteen, other girls had developed breasts and were kissing boys- I was a defeated and plagued Punk in a little girl's body with with braces and bad self- esteem and torn combat boots. I responded to the bullying mostly with a bold face and a quiet acceptance of their insults as the truth on the inside. No one outside of my family had ever told me I was beautiful. Boys didn't look at me. I was pretty much invisible to most everyone, except my abusers.

At sixteen, I had my first real boyfriend. Let me tell you something: After someone has been told for nearly their whole Life that they have never been and never will be beautiful, trying to convince them otherwise is going to be a battle you will fight for the rest of your Life. He was seventeen, tall, sculpted, with long, blond hair and teeth like ivory. I was small, fragile, with stained teeth and bad skin. He was everything I wanted, because he was everything I was not. His laugh was thunder, and he smiled, big. I never smiled without covering my mouth with my hand. And forget about laughing out loud. I was trained not to do that in front of anyone.

Letting him love me was a lesson on taking everything I was taught and unlearning it. It was fights of him brushing the hair from my face just so he could look me in the eye to tell me I was beautiful. It was going into public with him and watching him carefully to see if he looked at girls. It was hours spent on looking at his girl friends and his exes and comparing myself to them, by every strand of my hair. It was nights spent staying up, looking for some confirmation of my suspicion that maybe he loves someone prettier, not because I didn't trust him, but because I did not believe I was ever worthy of being the only one in anyone's Life because of my face or my shoesize or my brasize or my skin. Because I didn't know I would ever know love without a catch or a punchline- some sick joke that was being sent up for me for months.

To this day, I cannot let myself believe anyone who tells me I'm beautiful. I can't just accept a compliment. I have to read into everything, every detail someone says to me, looking for the punchline. Waiting for the snicker. To this day, when the love of my Life, my best friend, brushes the hair from my face, he kisses me from my forehead down my nose down my chin, over both of my cheeks, I still will not believe him when he tells me he loves all my imperfections. He kisses me, hard, and I still do not believe him when he calls me cute. To this day, I hate it when anyone calls me pretty. Partly because of the simple fact that I have done nothing to achieve being pretty. Partly because I do not genuinely believe anybody who says it. Partly because when I walk into a room with men leering at me, I know they are not thinking "She must be a fantastic poet," or "She must have worked so hard to be where she is now," or "She must have big plans to change the World."

If you're out there and somehow this relates to you, let me tell you this: You are beautiful. Not because of your genetic makeup and your phenotypes and your haircut and your clothes. No. You are beautiful because you made it this far. Something in you pushed you along and you survived the kids at School and you're still here. You are breathing, organic, miraculous greatness that's going to make the World a good place. Let somebody love you just as you are, as ugly as you sometimes feel. And if you still feel ugly, I will kiss your forehead and keep rooting for you.

-xx