Ugly

‘You are ugly’. You are ugly’. You are ugly’. You’d think after so many of them it would become white noise, elevator muzak that means nothing - a soundtrack to my life. But it hurts every time – the pain is sharp, my knees bend, the earth become heavy like metal, the planet is a huge round magnet, and there is no way in hell I can lift those leaden feet off the ground. The corners of my mouth slide down, and they’ll never go up again in a smile. My lids are closing, I want to crawl under a blanket and never come out again.

‘You are beautiful’. ‘You are beautiful’. ‘You are beautiful’. It’s hard to tell which one hurts more – the first one, at least it’s true, or the second, a pure lie. Is he kidding me? Is that what he says to everyone? His pick-up line? His post coital line? ‘Beautiful’ is devalued to dangerous noise: violent screams, cunning rationalisations, soft whispers into my young ear about ‘love’, about ‘not being afraid’. He must be one of those smooth talkers, I think, he must be lying there, thinking ‘What a stupid bitch! Beautiful! And she’s buying all that, with those features, that nose, those ears, that forehead. What a dumb dumb bitch’, he laughs to himself, and says aloud ‘Sveta, you are beautiful’.

Over the years I have hoarded a collection of dresses. Most of them are virgins – something I never got to be. Mirrors are the enemy. Once I catch a glimpse of myself from an angle I am not used to (you learn to tolerate the monster staring back) – in a public toilet, at the movies – and that familial feature taunts me, screaming ‘You are one of them’. Instantly, I want to die.

And the harder I try not to look into mirrors, the craftier their jumps at me become. Every parked car, every window shop is a traitor – and those around me, the strangers passing me in the street, the lover who says with a hint of annoyance ‘your hair looks nice, as always’, see me as an arrogant vain bitch. They have no idea.

Waking up to a lover who stares hard at me and utters: ‘Lord, the wonders cosmetic surgeons could do to people’, is no longer earth-shattering: pain endured for a long time dulls all emotions.

It’s interesting how pain drowns every hope of good judgement, as if your brain is underwater and all sane sounds are muffled. After walking the maternity hospital hall of shame, blood pouring out of me, car seat in my hand, ‘Don’t drop the baby’ on my mind to a taxi that took me to a student dorm where no humans awaited me – I reasoned no one will ever touch me, make love to me, want to be my friend. Why did it happen to me? I incessantly asked myself. I could have found an array of reasons: bad choices, bad karma, bad personality. No, stubborn as a bull, I told myself – it’s because I’m ugly. Ugly. Ugly. Ugly.

Slowly but steadily hope began to bicker at the horizon, hope that if I cut half of my face off I may stand a chance, I can become passable, not entirely a beauty but not entirely a monster – something watchable. I read through countless plastic surgery articles and stared at countless pictures. I made up a budget and started saving. I thought of the possibility of having six months of peace required to heal a nose job – with my then-two-year old child, who twisted my glasses into convoluted rollercoaster tracks and gave me a black eye every week on average. Nothing in my life has been normal up to that point, and I found a new addiction. I knew I wouldn’t stop if I began. I looked at the faces of people who’d done it, whose parents called them ugly when half of the population of the earth found their faces the cutest. These faces disfigured beyond recognition – the portrait of Dorian Grey, the portrait of modern ‘culture’ and what it deems pretty. I was scared. It was nothing but more pain.

I am alive because I fight fire with fire. When I was scared, I watched zombies eat people. When I was afraid to go out (everyone who stared at me thought ‘what an ugly, ugly bitch’; everyone who laughed was laughing at me), I started a blog on eating out, forcing myself to go. The first time I went out, alone, to a small coffee shop, my whole body went rigid, my heart trembled with a cold, I wouldn’t lift my eyes from my paper, setting the coffee cup too loudly, unable to swallow the food I chewed like gum.

I am alive because I am stubborn. As a little girl, being taunted at school all the time, bullied at home where no one ever stood up for me because ‘we had to be nice to our neighbors’, who called me, you guessed it, ugly, ugly, ugly, and did other things – but that’s another story, I would take out the hidden brushes, the forbidden sets of make-up and sit for hours in front of the mirror, painting, painting, painting. 

Faces are the only thing I could ever draw, faces of the people I love so much, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Lauryn Hill, Mary J Blige. So I painted a face for myself – a new face, a face no one would laugh at, a face everyone would love: colour on the bone cheeks, forehead and chin; heavy eye shadow and liner, ten coats of mascara; lip liner, dark, sculpted; lipstick – lighter, a dot of white shadow in the middle for a finishing touch. I looked at that face hard – one day I would wear it.

Look at me now. Look hard at me. You did everything to erase that face. But I am here. Pretty or ugly, I am alive.