Ugly

At 11, I was a wonky looking kid.

How wonky you ask? Well, I didn’t have any extra limbs sprouting from my forehead, no obvious deformities to speak of . I did however have a bristling unibrow , chronic allergies, the childhood scourge of corrective braces and curiously chameleon skin which ranged in tone from corpse gray to anemic yellow depending upon the temperature.

None of these were tantamount to say a tail or an extra head but coupled with my congenital awkwardness, I managed to imbue my person with an extraordinary measure of weirdness.

Telling kids that they are weird looking isn’t a generally accepted parenting technique.

I still maintain that it is sheerly negligent parenting not to address it if your kid is this weird looking, but my folks were no exception to the conventional rule. They had four kids. Three of whom were quite conventionally attractive and confident and then through some twist of the genetic draw they had me.

I get it no one quite knows what to say to an ugly kid. A straightforward revelation like hey kid, you’re ugly is looked upon as bullying behavior.

Instead people tiptoe around the issue hiding said ugly duckling behind a taller sibling or handy lampshade during family photo-ops.If the family in question has a slightly more straightforwardly medieval mindset , an iron mask ,a tower or a dungeon. May come into the picture.

These measures of course are now frowned upon. In today's world Ugliness is that elephant in the room, that everyone sees , but no one acknowledges. At least not directly.

Visiting aunties would pinch my brother's cheeks, ruffle their hair and gush over my elder sisters' placidly serene good looks. Such a beauty, mashAllah. Then they would pause disconcertedly at me before passing by in uneasy silence.

Well.What do you say about an ugly kid.

Pity about that one?

Well three out of four isn’t bad?

Or if you’re particularly puzzled, Is that the family dog?

My mother beamingly oblivious would smile. Yes, yes, my elder daughter looks just like me. The little one takes after her fathers side of the family (my mother and father are first cousins and our familial gene pool is a veritable swamp, a hair breadths shy of outright incest) There are NO sides.

But. Know this.If you’re the kid whom no one owns up to looking like, or is often told they take after their moms inlaws. Congratulations. You are probably your families ugly duckling.

Storytellers throughout the ages have gingerly attempted to demystify the phenomenon of ugly.For the most part they have been astoundingly unsuccessful. Having hit upon the idea that good looks are a reflection of inner goodness and those unfortunate individuals who are less than conventionally attractive, well its probably karma.If they were good people it would shine through in the form of symmetrical noses and well sculpted thighs., wouldnt it, well wouldn’t it?

First lets deal with the ugly duckling.

Superficially it is sold as an endearing parable about acceptance and finding ones place in the world.

But, look a little closer and the primary moral of the story is more insidious. .Basically its ok to be ugly as long as you get hot and not just ordinary hot. In order to redeem your deeply offensive phase of initial ugliness , in your later years you must be the hottest of the hot.

Which is why our little gray cygnet is bullied and pummeled by its childhood playmates only to grow up into an impossibly graceful swan.Far outstripping its childhood bullies in the looks stakes.

Ok. but what happens if the ugly duckling is in fact just a duck, a weird-ass looking duck? With no redeeming glow up.Nothing to justify its continued existence.

Do we eat it? Do we kill it and bury it in the deepest darkest depths of our local pond like a shameful secret ? To this day I’m unable to deconstruct this story and arrive at a satisfactorily egalitarian conclusion.

Then there is beauty and the beast, beloved childrens classic and seminal sugar daddy chronicle courtesy the brothers Grimm, The moral of this story is, it's ok to be heinously ugly if you are the de facto owner of an enchanted castle and a genuine “nice guy”. In this case you will be able to redeem the unforgivable sin of being less than aesthetically pleasing, get the gold digger/girl .Be a full on simp till she falls for you and off course, get hot. No one is interested in you if you’re not hot. Remember that.

Or say Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. The heartwarming tale of how one reindeers handicap was deemed to have a functional use after all . And so said handicap was immortalized in rhyme for the edification of future generations. So the moral here is ,it's ok to be different as long as someone somewhere has a use for your particular handicap.

Are you a midget? Have you gotten a freak show gig and successfully monetized your handicap? Are you a niche stripper catering to a discerning clientele of midget fetishists.Remember be useful to the normies or die.

Are you freakishly tall? Have you found sartorial success walking runways as a human clothes rack,are you an internationally recognized basketball player or otherwise recognized and lauded for your difference. If not, please fold yourself up neatly and wear flats.

Or Snow white, the touching tale of the ultimate triumph of budding teenage beauty over a nauseatingly middle aged woman living in a feudal society .A woman so brainwashed that she believes her worth is based solely on her looks.So isolated that she is driven to talking to a mirror. Which informed her as mirrors will, that she was indeed aging and her step daughter was blossoming by the day and maybe..just maybe that her lecherous husband's wandering eye may even wander in the direction of his teenaged daughter

And then there is the princess and the frog, a treatise to a halfwit maiden who goes around molesting unwitting amphibians betting on the unlikely chance that one would turn into a prince. Having worked her way through the majority of the kingdoms amphibian population she does eventually happen upon an enchanted frog who turns into you guessed it, a prince , a handsome one no less .The no doubt addled formerly amphibian prince doesn’t dwell overmuch on his lady loves lack of boundaries or indeed ,her lack of discrimination .He instead declares his intention to wed and bed her and since he is ‘handsome” she off course complies with disturbing alacrity. I’m fairly sure these two have generations of rapacious halfwits in their progeny.

Or last but definitely not least Sleeping beauty. A beautiful “(but off course) princess cursed at birth by an evil fairy out of a curiously baseless mixture of spite and jealousy.

At the age of 16 (2 years before the age of consent might I add) she falls asleep after pricking her finger on a spinning wheel only to be awakened by a “handsome” creep of a prince intent on having his way with a sleeping minor

For those familiar with the original version of this fairy tale. That “kiss” was a lot more involved and gropey than disney let on.

I’m uncertain what the moral here is.

It’s only rape if the prince is ugly? He is handsome ,therefore consent is implied if not vocally given.

Rich guys don’t rape?

I have an alternative to these tales.

Once upon a time. There was a duck. It was as ducks go, sort of ugly. The other ducks were mean to it, as ducks can be. But the duck said fuck that because the duck had a full and happy life.The duck quite liked long gummy worms and idle days spent bobbing on the pond's surface. The duck knew that gummy worms taste just as good even if you’re ugly ,the duck eventually met other ducks who were not such superficial assholes and he found that lazy afternoons in the sun with friends could also be fun .He also knew that eventually everyone dies and goes to that great big pond in the sky .So it doesn’t really matter much. The duck had a good life and was well loved. He is still fondly remembered by his peers.

Once upon a time there was a reindeer with a shiny nose, in his teens he streamed some helpful makeup tutorials and bought a lot of mattifying powder hoping to get that shine down to manageable levels .He eventually did get the knack of it and was selected for santas sleigh team. Eventually he realized that being selected for the sleigh team meant long hours in the frigid cold spent pulling that lazy lump santa from one end of the earth to the other.

Rudolph decided that he was better off in the barn. He ditched the mattifying powder and makeup tutorials and did a correspondence course in physiotherapy instead. Dasher, prancer, vixen and blitzen met with a nasty sleigh accident and had to take early retirement. They have muscular trauma to this day. Rudolph now has a lucrative home setup where he offers physiotherapy services to his former colleagues.

Once upon a time there was a beast. Although he was a bit of a crotchety old bugger he had a lovely enchanted castle, talking cutlery and armoires for company and a well stocked library.During the worse of his midlife crisis he was almost entrapped by a gold digging librarian but his friends staged an intervention. By all accounts he had a happy and fulfilling old age and is mourned by both the candlesticks and Mrs Potts to this day.

Once upon a time there was a queen who knew that she was more than what she looked like and she didn’t approve of the way her husband looked at his teenage daughter .She fled the castle in the middle of the night with her step daughter in tow. She put her knowledge of potions to good use and opened a wildly successful apothecary in a neighboring kingdom. She never had to talk to a mirror ever again. She founded a flourishing coven and her legacy is carried on by her devoted step daughter.

Once upon a time there was a princess who kissed a frog and contracted a nasty salmonella infection. She subsequently learnt from her youthful indiscretions and started a kingdom wide campaign aimed at educating dimwit maidens on the dangers of zoonotic diseases and their spread via intimate contact with reptiles and amphibians. She also did extensive research on bestiality as a kink and has hosted a series of respected seminars on interspecies consent entitled “how far is too far?”

And off course Sleeping Beauty.

Once upon a time there was a princess, on hearing that she had been cursed by way of spindles and spinning wheels.She outlawed the ownership of a spinning wheel in her kingdom and commissioned a pair of puncture resistant Kevlar gauntlets to be worn at all times.She went on to become a respected weapons specialist and couturier.

So in keeping with the spirit of these rewritten fairytales I rewrote my own script from wonky teenager to functional adult. And in the course of this mental rewrite,I did eventually outgrow a lot of my superficial weirdness.

I was even conventionally ok looking for a while.So much so that people who knew me from my awkward preteen years swore blind that they had in fact never met me at all.

Now I am slowly entering the twilight zone of almost invisibility which is the mid thirties .

I have accepted that my ability to appear human is now directly proportional to the number of hours of sleep I have had and inversely proportional to the amount of calories ingested as carbohydrates,

My stomach is no longer ironing board flat. When the light hits just so I can see laugh lines. There are some white hair. Occasionally I can hear a knee pop. My 11 year olds friends call me aunty without a hint of irony. All the romantic interests in my favorite cancer kid movies now look like they’re 15.

Occassionally I dress up. Most days I don’t. I own seven pairs of pajamas. One for each day of the week. Yesterday my seven year old informed me that his mama was pretty. The day before that my friend of 2 decades bluntly informed me that I needed to get more sleep because I looked and I quote “like death warmed over”. Neither statement interfered with said sleep.

If a cupcake makes me happy.I eat it. If doom scrolling till 3am is what my heart desires. I do it.

And I’m ok with this because oranges still taste like liquid sunshine ,laughter is still something to be relished. Sitting in the park with a brisk breeze on my face is still a pleasurable experience.

I know this now.

Like the ugly duckling Its ok to be wonky.

its ok to age like the queen.And frankly better than the alternative.

its ok to be like the beast , an anti social recluse.

To be less than perfect like rudolph.

To be weird. If weird is what you want to be.To kiss frogs of the metaphorical variety (because disease) as long as you learn from your mistakes.

To be ugly on the outside , because honestly there are many many worse things a person could be. E.g. a superficially handsome rapist convicted of statutory rape.

No one has all the answers and no opinion is definitive.

Its ok to be wholly imperfectly perfect.

To be yourself.

It's ok to simply be.