Dear Society

Dear Society,

Can I be pretty too?

I used to ask this question all the time. It’s the only phrase that would ring in my mind, that I couldn’t think of anything else. After a heartbreak, and later on a betrayal, the mirror told me it was an enemy I’d continuously lose to and not an angel that I could root for and be proud of. It clicked into my mind before I realized it did, that mindset, and irritatingly it was a lot harder to get rid of than it was to get there in the first place. I cannot describe how much I hated that that’s how it had to be.

It should be against the law for me to have ever felt that way, but there was no shedding that darkness overnight. For years, my nose was to blame – it was too wide to be presentable to anybody including myself. My skin was too dark, my hair was too in-between curly and straight, my eyelashes were too short, my lips were too thin. The list went on and on, and the longer it lingered into every crease in my brain, the more I became my biggest fear, and eventually my only fear I could know of. Feeling unworthy and unlovable, I told myself it was a fact that the reason I would lose the things I cared about was simply because I wasn’t enough and wouldn’t ever be enough.

My now ex-boyfriend who didn’t even bother to break up with me, but who decided to stop communicating with me entirely until I took the hint, for starters. Once upon a time, in my imagination it was my fault that he wouldn’t pick up my calls. It was my fault that I ended up hating the gym’s locker room where we met for the first time coincidentally so much that I couldn’t go back for months, and my stupid fault to think high enough of myself to believe that he looked passed me being such a sweaty state, looking a mess and my hair sticking to my face, or the fact that my singing voice echoed off key in the nearby area before I realized he was around, casually watching with his signature yet idiot smirk on his face.

The pain that I felt while I was practically grieving him when it clicked that he was gone forever onward – I thought that was my fault too. Pain, pain, endless pain that nothing could top no matter how much I tried to put my head somewhere else, anywhere besides him. Stretches that I forced on myself just to help me get out of bed, that didn’t end up working in the least and rubbing tears from my eyes so hard that I saw stars were mere symptoms to how badly he shattered me without hesitation, without a care. My skin on an electric fire every morning until evening was another. Having to gobble up the air for it to slither down into my lungs was probably the worst one, you know, besides the pain itself, writing a big fat zero on my forehead that I swore everyone could see when I walked the aisles of the grocery store.

My middle school rival who I coincidentally ran into one day despite being across state lines, who was just as snobbish and haughty as I remembered, her grew up to become model material: as if she wasn’t already a model to begin with: the smoothest, softest of skin, long legs, the perfectly tan skin, voluminous hair despite it being wet from her day out at the beach – it had to have been my fault that I didn’t have a glow up like she did, right? It had to be my fault that she had the energy to keep up her body, rather than let herself go, and it had to be stupid of me to blame my depression for not being able to look my very best. It was my own fault that I wasn’t as career driven as her, and that yet despite the busy schedule she had the time for yoga and kickboxing and softball. It had to be my fault that I was slow in life, far far behind her, and she had to be right when she rubbed that in my face. She had to know what she was talking about. Anxiety free and perky as always, she figured out life. She was successful.

I wasn’t. I was a failure and screaming into pillows again and again to conceal my annoyance was what I had to have accidentally brought upon myself. I felt ill, scared and stupid at all times, and if I didn’t, I felt numb from head to toe. That was my own dang fault. I was incapable of going on forward, and I had to watch everyone else soar right on past me. There was no light at the end of the tunnel, no escape, no thrill and I didn’t have the power to change that, or to stop time, to take a pause, because the world spun regardless and I couldn’t tell it otherwise, to back up and let me breathe like some seemed to figure out how to do.

I was too weak, and thus a waste of time. I couldn’t refocus. I couldn’t get back on track, so I had no choice but to sit and watch as every year got shorter and the wrinkles on my face conquered their places on my skin. I became the sole epitome of “treading water” before I knew what the term meant, and I was being cast about by the ocean on a stormy day.

I mastered panic better than anyone I’ve ever known, and every tomorrow was getting dreadful instead of smiley. I prayed every birthday to be my last. Everytime it came I dreamed of my childhood to return back when it would be a good day and not one I’d want to spend the night bawling. I wanted to go back in time. In terms of intelligence and innocence, I was still a kid not meant to be unsupervised who still had a lifetime to grow up, but in terms of emotions I was dead and that was taking over my bones, my organs, my blood. I was turning to ash too fast.

And yet people kept telling me to continue onward, as if they had the motivation they spoke of themselves. I had no idea where they got that energy from and why they were telling me to keep going strong without letting me in on whatever secret that was, because I seemed to need it more than any one of them, but man, I tried. I tried to start from the top with the fuel I had left in my tank, blinking at empty, and I put everything into doing what the sweet ones told me to do. I took it to heart. I listened to them as well as I could, and aged and aged and aged as I tried. I jumped to be a winner, as I couldn’t live being a loser very much longer. I told myself for the first time in forever, that I deserved more. That I deserved better – an optimism long forgotten.

Until it finally clicked and stayed with me. I drank in the “fairytale” that I needed to be happy. I gave myself something to live for. I broke free from the chains that bound me. No longer so deeply concerned about the time I was losing, I was appreciative of the time I have, and eventually appreciative of the face that stared back at me in the mirror. The first time it was accidental, a glimpse of my face in a shop window, but I felt an improvement instantly in that one glimpse. Right then, I wasn’t short of standards. I was the me I wanted to be.

Still am. Always will be from here on, proud of it.

I promised myself I’d write society a letter where I wasn’t saying “can I be pretty too?” in it’s contents, and here I am. I’ve done it. That’s what this is.

I’m pretty too, is how it’s supposed to be. Fact. Not a question.

-C.R

P.S I love you friends. The real ones who stuck with me.