Ugly Beautiful Girl

My therapist made a point to call me pretty. She did the thing where she regurgitates what I say in an abstraction. It usually illicits something between an Oh Duhhhh or Oh Shitttt moment for me. I felt neither. I felt squeamish. It would probably be funnier if I delivered this information in a sassy, owning-it way. I could come off like such an It-Girl if I was like, Yeah I’m so Fucking Hot Get like Me. That’s not how I feel, and when I am that way, it’s a joke (I know to some of you, this is obvious). My therapist bestowed the title on me, retelling me as a pretty character in my own story. A very pretty girl. I’m not bragging when I mention very. I just noted the distinction. I’m taking the risk of being very cheesy by making this full circle: I definitely feel like a character when I act like I believe I am pretty. I wonder if she sees my big pores and ruddy skin from her therapist chair, when she calls me pretty. People who call me pretty must not have seen me. At least not up close.

It infuriates my mom (and a few of my friends) to know that I think this way. For me, I am embarrassed to admit it on a public forum. This is a very self-deprecating, bordering-on-weird-and-kind-of-sad blog post. If you don’t want that vibe, just save yourself and don’t read. But I know I am not unique (to my dismay) in the human experience, and someone else may feel ugly-beautiful too, and seek solace in the fact that I said it out loud. The whole blog post is an admittance that I think about myself too much, think about looks too much, and think negatively about all three (myself, the way I look, overthinking). I’m very guilty of this, but I can’t seem to think-my-way-out-of-it. In fact, I think I thought-my-way-into-it. Whatever. I was raised on the fact that you don’t admit any of the above. I can’t help it that I like to bleed on the internet.

For my mom, I think its three fold: 1. I look like her, so its a bit insulting that I don’t believe I’m pretty. Plus I was raised by her, made from her genes, she told me compliments growing up, so I really should believe her, I’m pretty. 2. It’s a weakness to be out of touch like this, prettiness is a strength, please don’t tell people you don’t think you’re pretty, they will take advantage. If you’re pretty, you have an advantage, you’re pretty. “Own it” she has said. 3. It’s sad, you’re out of touch with reality, this disconnect is so negative, you are so self-deprecating, so hard on yourself, so pretty. “I can’t understand why you don’t see how pretty you are” she has said. She sends me photos of myself sometimes. It makes my stomach curdle. Thank god she doesn’t have facebook anymore. We’ll keep my ugliness private.

The friends that are infuriated by this have thoughts that come from different places. I infer that either 1. They love me unconditionally and want me to be at peace with myself and the world, and to feel pretty, because to feel pretty is to feel important and worthy and many other things. 2. They have a complex with me, trying to decide if they’re better or not, they don’t feel as stacked in the looks department, and it’s invalidating that I don’t think I’m pretty, especially if they think they’re less pretty than me. 3. They want hot friends who know and believe they’re hot, and not just acting in-character hot, get it the fuck together, get out of your head and get dressed we’re going out RN, and we’re all hot.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to mope out loud about my distorted thinking, or hyper-awareness of myself and my looks. It would come off as fishing, and it is a bit weird to think about yourself this much, especially in a bad way. My brain doesn’t turn off, so I’m always thinking. It seeps out in little things I say, in ways I act, in guys I go for. I’m not calling out my big bad belief of being ugly, having big flaws that deem me untouchable. I’m called out for it. I’m like shit, how’d you catch me, I was enjoying my miserable ugly thinking. There are a lot of mirrors in my apartment, and reflections in shop windows, and my phone camera, and other ways I can see myself. So, yeah, I’m going to think about that. And I don’t like what I see. Probably because I’m looking for it. But still. You see it too (the horribly obvious flaws).

When I imagine myself in my minds eye, I see zoom-in-imagery of my least favorite things. Or a cartoonish portrayal of myself. I think I watched too much spongebob growing up, where they zoom in on a hyper-detailed, hyper-realistic drawing of his face looking absolutely disgusting. My brain does that. It’s not cool. It’s not becoming. It’s actually absurd for a 26 year old girl to equate herself to hyper real spongebob. IDK what to tell you.

I should also state, I can take a compliment. I love a compliment. I hang onto compliments like a saving grace, that someone else’s perception of me is kinder than my own. I always believe other people first, and myself second. This is f*cked up, because I do believe I am smart, and insightful, and can get to conclusions on my own. I’ll chalk it up to humans being innately social, and this is something everyone does, insert some other excuse, I’ll give the responsbility of the Truth to someone else. I hope their version of the truth fares well for me! I wonder if they know how much responsibility they hold over my world-view and my self-view. How fun! Here’s all the power!

So, the matter at hand: my therapist was being strategic in calling me pretty, because I told her that I don’t believe I am a pretty girl. This was in a story, but I had some explaining to do, why I thought the way I was thinking, and why I acted the way I did. So I told her: I do know that I am pretty, in a cerebral way, but I don’t believe it in my heart. I think my soul is pretty, not to be cheesy. Aside from my retaliative, reactive ways, and sometimes being intentionally shitty (guised by humor) in an effort to strike a chord, I generally operate with empathy. Like, I try to be nice. Probably because people have been mean to me before. Sometimes I can be mean, probably for the same reason. Oh well your soul being pretty is the most important thing! I don’t know if that is true. We live in capitalist america, we live in a patriarchy, beauty is commodified, money is king, bla bla. I could go on about this, but we know these things, and we’ve read them before. Someone has said it perfectly, and I don’t feel like trying to do that. I’d love to read discourse on the beauty-inclusivity campaigns, but I don’t feel like writing it. What I’m saying is: being pretty is pretty important, if we’re looking at the facts. And people have called me pretty before. This bestows importance upon me. This is a big responsbility. This could make me a threat, if I wasn’t such a clown. Luckily I am a clown, and sometimes I think this protects me from being too pretty to be threatening.

A little anecdote about pretty as a threat: I got really pissed in college, in the exaggerated way that I do, bitching to my friends about being called pretty. It’ll make more sense when I explain: I actually got called intimidating. There was no mention of pretty. In college, I was on a wave of thinking I was hot-shit, because the younger generation of boys in the frat I liked got into a habit of greeting me with “Hello Beautiful”. It happened like clock-work. I especially loved when they did this in front of guys my year, who I had romantic (or sexual, if we’re being literal) entanglements with. Like: hear that? You should be proud of me! I am pretty, if you we’re doubting it! Cos I was doubting it, but right now I’m not!! Being called beautiful in a crowded room, especially a crowded room in a frat house, gave me a feeling of importance and validity that I didn’t even get when I received my college diploma. You could bottle that feeling and market it like a drug. I was convinced it brainwashed the others: Kelley is beautiful. You can’t see it, but if you hear it enough, you’ll believe it. So, I’ve set the scene. Enter a popular little girl, a few years younger than me, in top tier sorority (not my own) (my own was also top tier, which I thought meant important, and thus pretty, amongst other things, so I care to distinguish that for the sake of this story). She was a fellow alcoholic, unbeknownst to both of us at the time, and shared my habit of spewing whatever popped into my mind in that moment. We we’re both sloppy, but this night, she got to it faster than I had. We were definitely friendly, both fans of the frat and fans of the bottom shelf liquor they supplied. We shot the shit often, because we crossed paths often. All that to say, I had long decided I liked this girl. She got to talking, and admitted “I was always so intimidated by you.” I asked for clarification, because that immediately annoyed me. Intimidated why? I have always been so nice to you? I have always been so drunk with you? How could you stab me in the heart like this? Deep down I knew what she meant. But she didn’t tag on any sort of compliment. Not to mention, she said it in front of a popular little boy, a few years younger than me, the little brother of my best friends boyfriend. To me, intimidating was ugly. I was raised to be nice (within reason) and to be called intimidating was to be called unpopular, unlikable, callous, rude, and a litany of other nasty things she never said. Even the way she said it, I knew it wasn’t an insult. But I was embarrassed, because I thought we were on a train of complimenting me here? Why didn’t you just call me nice? You think I’m nice, now, right? I went on and on that night when my friends and I got home. Maybe I was half-pissed I didn’t wind up in bed with an entanglement of mine, cos in college, that meant I was ugly, too. Like you looked at me, you know we sometimes sleep together, and you chose not to sleep with me tonight? Cos I’m not pretty tonight? Didn’t you hear that I was called beautiful a bunch of times? Aren’t you proud of me? But I went on about this girl the next day, and channeled all of my insecurities into that one little comment that she definitely didn’t even remember making. But she thought it! When I got the lucky chance to mention it to a friend who hadn’t heard, I brought it up again. How could she? So rude! She embarrassed me! She made me seem like a bitch! Finally, one of my friends told me to STFU, she was calling you pretty. Well no she wasn’t, because she didn’t say that. I went on about it because I really needed someone to say that. Like, spell out what she meant. But you do it, because I can’t. I can’t because I don’t believe it, and even if I thought it, I wouldn’t dare say it. Because what if I am wrong?

I myself am not intimidated by beauty alone. Being pretty + being stylish + being loved (or known) by the masses + a slight level of aloofness + a hint of genuine personality + good posture, or height, or some level of presence + wealth = intimidating. Because I have low self worth and poor self image, I give myself one of those high-praises at a time, if at all. I am not intimidating.

I think most people are being strategic when they call you pretty, like my therapist was being. I also think people are being strategic when they don’t, or won’t call you pretty. And of course, there are different types of pretty, and different ways to say it. Looks in a woman range from cute to beautiful to gorgeous, sexy (forbidden word, unattainable for someone who is a clown) and I’ve been called all of those things (sexy being the most confusing, because clown). I don’t know which of these categories I actually fall into. I think about it sometimes, when I try to understand myself. Obviously the way to know yourself is based on what adjective is used to describe your face. And they are categories more than adjectives. You called me cute, and when you said that you factored in my dress, the color style and texture of my hair, the color of my iris’ in different lighting, my education, my upbringing, my hobbies and habits and mannerisms and the way I act when no one is around. You thought of all those things and you put me in a caste system. And I must ponder now how I will exist in the caste. Not only have you helped me understand myself more deeply, but you help me understand my role in the world. Thank you.

Of course, these calculations are not done in a vacuum. I’ve made my dad explain “cute” to me before, at length. Of course, I had just been called cute. I asked again about cute, juxtaposed with sexy, with my younger brother in the room. I needed to ask two generations, my dad and my brother, but not my mom, because boys saying you’re one form of pretty is a lot different than a girl saying it. But I’d later ask my mom, because she’s wordier, and I could pry more, given the newfound perspective I gained from my dad and brother. It would start thinly veiled as an abstraction, and I can’t keep a secret, so I’d confess as if they didn’t know: I was called this. Or I was not called that, but why? Could I be? (sexy). Am I? (girl next door, which is another way of saying cute apparently, but the girls next door in TV and Movies are usually something I’d call pretty). It probably is unnerving to imagine a conversation like this happening in the living room. You’d be surprised at the things I share with my family. Or maybe you wouldn’t because evidently, I have no filter, and no shame. But we’re not teasing out a white lotus plot here, and because its me, my family has come to expect absurd lines of questioning. Thank god!

Its tough, because when I do try to believe a compliment, I don’t know how much adjective I possess. My dad said that personality can inform a compliment like this, so while I may be pretty, my personality is cute. Does that make me less pretty? Do people like cute? Or is cute the same as corny and they think I’m pretty til they catch on that I’m kind of dorky, and then what used to look pretty now leans toward nerdy? This is exactly why my mom thinks its important to believe you’re pretty. The same way I believe it’s important for other people to greet you “hello beautiful”, very loudly in a crowded room. It’s like brainwashing.

Anyways, to talk further about prettiness, I should probably touch on ugliness. I fear I will make myself seem ugly at heart by talking about ugly. But this whole thing is vain, and ugly, and I often find myself in weird conundrums talking about things we like to not-talk-about. No one wants to be ugly, lets erase the words. That’s the vibe I’m getting. At least on the streets, online, the places where I am looking. Same with mental illness, no one wants that, let’s sterilize the conversation cos its very not-human to be mentally ill. It’s less-than. It’s very not-human to be ugly. Have you seen the magazines? Have you been on IG lately? Everyone is gorg. In fact, Ugly is the worst thing you can be, it’s offending me actually, and I can’t decide if I want to look at you with disgust or point and laugh. No one is Ugly but you, how awkward and embarrassing! That’s how it feels to own a face that you feel is ugly. Like, very not health and wellness and self care and self love clean girl of me, to be born with flaws. Ugly is weaponized. She is my competition? She is ugly! Or at least uglier than me.

Okayyyy, but is she funnier? smarter? better dressed? Is her daddy richer? There are many factors at play here…. and looks are the low hanging fruit.

Quick aside: Comments on my looks don’t phase me as much anymore. Not that they don’t phase me, but they used to fckng crush me. Things changed, because for one, I am my own biggest critic. I’ve lived with myself awhile, I know my flaws, I talk worse shit to myself, etc. Comments on looks are painful, sure, because I realize you see what I feared you were looking at. You can find what you’re looking for if you hate me, and you can remind me it exists. But I was thinking about this anyways, so whatever. (I have all these invisible enemies I talk to and think about, the whole giving my insecurities a host thing, cos if I’m thinking it, I need someone else to validate me).

So yeah, ugliness has always been considered, I am unsure if it has always been weaponized. I don’t know if they we’re seeking out the clean-girl-aesthetic in the 1800s, or 1900s. I was obsessed with watching beauty/fashion/body through-the-decades videos on youtube when I was younger. I think ugliness is subjective, based on those videos. Also based on makeup trends, like 2016 lewk would be kind of ugly right now, I think. But euphoria lewk is probably just as much makeup, and that’s in right now, so it has nothing to do with caking it on, it just has to do with appealing to a trend. Whatever. I’ve been reading old books lately, too, and they talk freely of ugliness, or homeliness, or plainness. We are much more concerned with looks now, and see a lot more faces than ever before. You’d think we’d get used to not everyone looking the same.

I do think a stunning personality can smudge out ugly. This isn’t new information. A personality doesn’t make someone 100% beautiful flaw-free if they’re truly an unfortunate looking person, but my eyes tend to float to their prettier qualities. Prettier in a way you didn’t recognize before you got to know the person, and now that you do you make a point to not see their worse qualities.

Ugly people who act ugly, however, are beastly. To me, at least. And then I don’t feel bad calling it as I see it, and I feel powerful to say: that person was a dick to me? well they’re ugly! And I dismiss it as that. Like their looks have made them less important to me, their words don’t matter because they don’t come from a pretty mouth. It seems that when someone “Deserves” it, you are free to use words like ugly to separate yourself, place yourself above, remove their freedom. Ugly is beastly and beastly is evil. You said something nasty, you’re evil, you’re ugly. And we aren’t even talking about looks anymore at that point. But the word lives. We don’t use the word pretty this way.

I mostly surround myself with pretty friends. Because even if I don’t believe myself to be pretty in my heart, I’ve experienced looks-jealousy before (sliding scale). I didn’t chalk it up to looks-jealousy at the time, because I understood even less about where I stood on the looks-scale when that was happening. But I’ve been called pretty a few times since then, and I just know it’s easier to avoid looks-jealousy by having friends who are as-pretty or prettier than me. I’ll also mention now that pretty people usually like to befriend me and overlook my clown-behavior, probably because they see me as pretty, or as-pretty as them. So I must be pretty, right?

I know people who have been called “cute” or “pretty” and I strongly disagree with the designation. I’m like: can you explain exactly how they fell into this category? I don’t look like that, but we’ve been called the same thing. I actually don’t like that we’ve been called the same thing. I try to see it: is it their clothes? their hair? their sick body? Is it their instagram? Their presence? If everyone is calling this girl hot or pretty, and I really don’t think she is, then someone is unreliable in their perspective. And it has to be me, because I’m the outlier here? Am I less pretty than I was made to believe I am? Did someone trick me, and this is a prank, and everyone is laughing that I was fooled and thought I was pretty? I am in my own head too much. Look in the mirror, doll, you’re pretty!!

To be fair, same thing goes with someone prettier than me. If don’t look like them, can we both be the same thing? Me less? Are they mad to be in the same caste as me? I think this confusion is a testament for bringing back long-form compliments, in the form of sonnets or ballads, performed outside of a window in the dead of night. Or letters with formal script. You think I’m pretty? Please, go on…..be really detailed with how pretty I am, what makes me pretty, when I look my prettiest, etc. I can send you a list of prompts if you need to jog your brain on what to include. Please be very very detailed, because it will help me understand myself and my role in this life. Think Shakespeare when you write, babe.

I know not everyone thinks I am pretty. 1. Many people have called me ugly before 2. Every person I’ve ever met hasn’t declared their undying love for me 3. because only Perfect people get to be considered everyone-agrees beautiful. I am not perfect looking, I am no ones object of affection, no one has recited a sonnet outside of my bedroom window, so I am not pretty. Also, regarding the ugly-person-pretty-personality thing, some people hate my personality. I’ve been told this before, to my face and behind my back. I am polarizing, and that’s okay. I thought, and sometimes still think: if I kept my mouth shut more, if I didn’t let them know what I’m really like, maybe I’d be pretty. But I can’t, I’ve tried. I’m clown. So I’m ugly.

So, ugly people. I don’t know. There’s not much to say on the subject, there’s less and less ugliness because of that thing where humans evolve to me more attractive and more intelligent as generations go on. Also because of looksmaxxing and plastic surgery, facetune (my fav), makeup, what have you. I’m happy that there are modes to level up in the caste system of looks. I also enjoy looking at beautiful things, including people. The more beauty the merrier. I will compliment the prettiest part of ugly looks, because its all relative, if you’re willing to find the beauty in someone. I do this because I don’t want someone to feel unloved and crumpled up and not important or worthy. That’s a bad feeling, and I’ve felt it. Not only when boys commented 7 or 8.5 on my facebook wall rating in middle school, while my best friends got 10’s across the board. Definitely when boys in my grade, boys who had been my boyfriend or my neighbor, called me ugly in facebook messages, or in person at school. The lingering comment: “a blind deaf man under the devils temptation wouldn’t find you attractive”. That one was from my neighbor. He was raised very religious (obviously), but I don’t believe that’s a very pious thing to say. Still, I believed him.

I am also good at doing this, because I date down, since I don’t want to think about my looks too much. If I date down, I can put looks-thoughts on the back burner. I then look past the bad-looking parts of the boy (which sucks, because I see them a lot, and up close, and like I said, I like beautiful looking things) and I give ugly-boy nice compliment. I am learning it’s not worth it to date ugly-boy as pretty-girl (Even if you don’t believe you’re pretty but you kind of know you are) because then looks becomes an issue. Like the aforementioned friends thing. Like, they resent you for your looks, kind of. Despite the thoughtful compliments and overlooking their bad parts. Ugly-boyfriends at first are happy to have pretty-girlfriend, then people look at you like—why her with him? Then the compliments dry up, and ugly-boyfriends have said not nice things about my looks. I almost told my family what was said, but I couldn’t bear it. I was too ashamed. Ugly-boyfriends really clock my worst flaws. The see me up close and they think I’m ugly, too. I couldn’t have my family knowing that people can see their daughters flaws. I come from their genes, it would bring shame to my ancestors. My family would say: why do you let people talk to you like that? I talk to myself like that, actually. It would hurt the same if a good looking boy did this, so I think I may run my luck with guys I am actually attracted to moving forward.

On the other hand (I’m done talking about ugliness for now), I do think about pretty people often. Not jealously, but I do question why I wasn’t born a little tweaked, a little more perfect, how does she look like that? WTF? I’ll often try to figure myself out relative to someone I believe to be extraordinarily pretty. Or rich and pretty, which seems to be a real fascination of mine lately. Like, how did you get born into both? I’ll really become infatuated with a girls’ looks, and her life. I will really believe her to be the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, I’ll consider how she probably acts when no one is watching (very ethereal), and the way a boy could never point out her flaws, cos there are none. I think about how her family has probably never seen her ugly. I’ve done this habitually, since I was a kid. It spans many different types-of-pretty, and I often forget about the girls as quickly as I discover them. Sometimes I don’t, and it takes a few months of fan girling and pondering if God will ever level-me-up to be in the same, or similar caste. I’ll have this idea that girl-of-the-moment is perfectly beautiful, and I’ll show my friends so they have to feel a little ache about not being born perfect, too, and they dismiss the whole idea entirely. They’re like, she’s regular. I’m like, look at her wardrobe, her hair thickness and style, look at her body on vacation and that cute bikini, look at her nice teeth and good makeup, her small pores, she’s perfect? And they’re just like, no. She’s not perfect. You’re showing me a regular girl. And that baffles me, because I was 10 steps less perfect than her, so what does that make me? My identity crumbles, because it’s fragile and swayed by what people say and how they treat me, how they view the world, because I don’t view it right. Clearly. I thought this regular girl was perfect! How blind of me.

Probably more important than getting prettier, is fixing this defect of character….

I haven’t fixed my defects, but I have gotten smarter with this. I now know the pretty scale does not just go up and down, but it is a matrix. I am not going to craft this matrix out in detail, because I haven’t thought that long or deep about it. The matrix exists so that I comfort myself in its existence, and chalk things up, and dismiss them, and not think too hard about looks (I do think too hard, about all things). Like, waste-bin-the-thought-and-stop-thinking-matrix. Like, don’t think too hard about looks you’re going to make yourself upset matrix. Warning: if you’re thinking hard enough about something that you need to make a matrix over it, you are thinking too hard. But fine….for the sake of being clear I’ll say the matrix considers things like, brunette light eye pretty vs dark eye pretty, buttoned up prim and proper pretty verses hippy dippy unbrushed hair RV camping pretty, roman nose pretty vs ski slope nose pretty. Those kinds of things. As I age and see more world, and more types of girls and more types of pretties, I become more appreciative of the dynamic pretties. Cos when I was growing up, the prettiest girls were the blonde hair ski slope nose girls (not me). Which always meant I wasn’t pretty. That’s not true, cos people call me pretty. So I belong somewhere on that matrix. I just don’t know where (enter doubt, overthinking, detailed spongebob face).

I didn’t tell my therapist about spongebob face, and I didn’t waste my 45 minute session detailing how much I actually think about looks. I don’t want to reveal all at once how vain and psycho I can be. I’ll let her infer that. This is partially why I was reluctant to get a new therapist after the last one came to an end. The unveiling of things. Though I recognize the curtain is likely not as thick as I believe, and she probably can tell I’m vain and an overthinker.

It was also difficult to get over the hump of ditching my last therapist, who got to know me very well. She looked like broccoli to me, which is something I had decided after she started getting on my nerves. She had short curly hair, very broccoli-like. This new therapist has longer (still short, but longer) curly hair, and she doesn’t look like a broccoli. She looks very stylish and smart to me, and she is objectively very pretty. Maybe she would get a vegetable name if she started getting on my nerves, but nothing as mean as broccoli. She’s too pretty for that. I think pretty people inherently trust other pretty people, and ugly people distrust pretty people, and pretty people distrust ugly people. This makes me think that I’ve been brainwashed into thinking I’m pretty, and maybe more important. That is an ugly way to think, and I’m ashamed to say it. Birds of a feather, I suppose. I know my caste, I suppose. But I don’t believe myself to be so cruel (apparently, I am).

So yeah, with my last therapist, it got to the point where I was like: what do I say to you? Do you not trust me because I am pretty? Do you think I’m less than pretty because I behave in a way a pretty person would not? I say things like I don’t think I’m pretty, you look puzzled and that bothers me because you’re supposed to hear me out not convince me otherwise? or maybe because I feel I have to dance around the fact someone in my story is ugly? Because I don’t want to say it and give pretty people a reputation for being ugly at heart? I’m revealing I think ugliness as a negative quality, and if someone was shitty to me, they deserve a shitty title? Does it seem like I think looks are the most important quality, since I consider myself pretty in terms of this story, and I made a point to emphasize that? Why am I paying you if I can’t be myself? Do I like myself? Why do I think so much about myself? I’d like to think ugly things in private, actually, I think you’re judging me for saying I’m pretty, and she’s ugly. God I’m sick of myself, I think I’m cured of all things now, I must go, you’ll never see me again. The issues I’m left with shouldn’t cost money to talk about anyways, my friends can probably handle this, they know I can be ugly sometimes. Thank you for your service, we are done here. Disclaimer: my problems became too big for friendship. I had to start paying someone to tell me things.

So I had the opportunity to tell my new therapist I don’t think I’m pretty. She’s getting to know me. I also was telling a story about coolness, and told her that while I am not cool in the grand scheme of things (inserted some self-deprecating comments), I’m cooler than this girl on the sliding scale. Which was obvi relevant to mention for my story, to paint the whole picture. So she understands I think of things in terms of relativity. I govern my thoughts and actions accordingly. She probably put 2 and 2 together and realized I spend a lot of time calculating prettiness in my head (much more than coolness, I might add) and she made a point to address it. She did this twice, actually (address it. call me pretty. whatever). And I winced. I’m not paying her to call me pretty. People do that for free. But now, we’re going to have to start talking about the logic of it. Or psychoanalyze it. I could tell myself I’ll do that for free, in a long-form-psuedo-essay on my new blog. I’ll tell her I found a conclusion:There is a difference between knowing and believing, and while I know I am a good looking girl because of my calculations and external factors, context, etc, I don’t believe I am, because of something inside. I don’t know what that is.

I can act pretty and do pretty things and I know people will let me get away with it, because oh, she’s pretty. That’s par for the course, for a pretty person to act this way. What way? Let me get my pen, I need to write down how a pretty person acts. I’m method acting, and I need all the perspectives to put on a good performance for the viewers.

Yeah, I wish I inherently felt pretty. It would be really nice to naturally assume to role of the highest caste in society. Pretty people dominate. But I don’t. I wear Pretty like a loose garmant. I shed it often. It’s like when I go to bed in my cute long sleeve pajamas, knowing I’ll rip the top off because its suffocating me, and probably the pants too, because I actually like to sleep naked. It feels perverted to sleep naked.

I know my prettiness is the truth because people have told me. Reluctantly sometimes, so I know it’s true, because it seems painful when they say it, but they feel responsible to be a truthful narrator in that moment. Like they don’t want to admit it to me, because they don’t want me to realize and start acting differently. I won’t, because I already knew that, someone already told me. They get their wish though, I don’t believe, and I probably never will. I only see myself in mirrors, and those get kinda fogged up. Especially in my apartment for some reason, even though I clean with windex. Lots of things work swimmingly at my parents’ house in New Jersey, like Windex and French press coffee, that don’t seem to work the same in New York. This is not a perspective thing. Because the way I feel about how I look has nothing to do with setting. It’s not the people I surround myself with, and how badly they want to build me up or cut me down. I feel same unease about my looks in New Jersey and In New York and anywhere else I’ve been. I feel the same way when my mom says I’m pretty, or a boy I slept with in college, or my friends who want me to love myself more, or the people who want me to hate myself more. The way I feel has nothing to do with the external world at all. As much as I repeat over and over that peoples words and actions affect me. Clearly, it’s something going on inside. When someone says bad, it reaffirms this bad belief I have about myself, and I thank them, and believe harder. When someone says good I hold onto the words in my brain, but it does nothing to change the way I feel and believe. I’m used to all of this now (shitty coffee in my apartment, fogged up mirrors, feeling like close-up spongebob, processing the external world in a distorted way). Some things have been accepted for longer than others. Like, I’ve only lived in this apartment for a year and a half. I’ve lived with myself forever.

Luckily, there is the aforementioned looksmaxxing. It’s only getting easier and cheaper to look less and less human and more and more like an Ai-generated robot girl. Like, I may wake up and look in a not fogged mirror one day, and see the facetuned version of myself. I wonder if that would cure my existential burnout, chronic overthinking, lack of self worth, and the wider array of character defects I cling to. I said countless times the issue here lies internally. I don’t believe the way I feel about my looks has anything to do with the way I actually look. I get treated like I’m in a pretty-good pretty-caste. Like, I’m one of the pretties. I’m saying that point blank, and I still feel this not-pretty way. I don’t think getting prettier would cure that feeling. Maybe I could circle back on this when I have the funds. Maybe by then I’ll be OK with my reflection, feel good about it even, won’t even looksmaxx that hard, just the usual anti-aging nip and tucks. Maybe my therapist will cure me, I won’t name her after a vegetable, or I will at least stop thinking about looks so much. I’m not hopeful, but I’m not doubtful, either.

At least the mirrors foggy.