They're too many stars and not enough sky

 All my life, I was made to believe that I was ugly. It turns out, there was nothing wrong with me.

I know I have touched on this before, and will most likely touch on it again. I don't care, this is my blog and personal corner of the internet. (Saying that honestly makes me feel like Mickey Mouse in Fantasmic, "THIS IS MY DREAM!!!")

For years, I was repeatedly told that I was ugly. I was made to believe that I was ugly. When people would call me beautiful or pretty, usually by adults, I could not believe it.

I know that there is more to life than  attractiveness, but since attractiveness is inherently political, and they way that it was weaponized towards me was inherently racist, in this instance, it absolutely matters.

Very few images of my teen years have digitized, due to both the analog nature of graduating  high school in 2005 and not having access to digital cameras until about 2007. But it was also an incredibly painful epoch of my life that was heavily defined by disordered eating, bullying, self-harm, and my own impossibly bad reactions to things.

It's so painful to look back on so many of these photos and see how absolutely miserable I was for the vast majority of my life, and how I had to hide so much of it for fear of being perceived as a burden. It's so painful to look back on photos of me as a kid trying to take up as little space as humanly possible, masking as hard as I could, and minimizing my own needs and discomforts so that I won't be noticed.

This is one of my favourite photos not only of my life, but of my whole life timeline. I was genuinely happy here. I knew this would probably be the last seminal moment that I would get to share with both of my grandparents. I also cannot believe that I was called "ugly" so much. I cannot believe that I was supposed to believe that that little girl was "ugly."

One of the interesting things about being a late-diagnosed autistic is that I now realize that a lot of what people didn't like about me was my inability to not be myself. I have always had a very strong sense of self and being and knowing who I am. I wasn't trying to be someone that I wasn't because I didn't know how. (There were, of course, episodes of inauthenticity throughout my life, due to either masking or mental illness issues. I am not going to pretend that those didn't exist.)  People were cruel to me because I was an easy target, but I was also an unrelenting target. They couldn't bully me out of being myself. I don't know the date on the above photo, but I was still a  very young child at the time this was taken, and this was my sense of style.

I also spent an unfortunate amount of time "friends" who were in secret competition with me. I was unaware of this until within the last couple of years. I am not competitive, and, because...*gestures broadly*, autism, wasn't picking up on these social cues. I am sitting next to one of them in this photo, whom I magnanimously cropped and blurred out. For so much of my youth, some of my biggest  bullies were my "friends;" because most people were cruel to me and bullied me, I thought that less-meanness was the norm. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that this was not normal! Competing with your friends is not normal. Being secretly resentful of your friends is not normal. I've also come to realize that a lot of these people I thought were my friends were secretly jealous of me. Yes, yes, I understand that this is very much a Leo thing to say, but hear me out. So much of what they did was  done out of secret (maybe not so secret) jealousy and resentment, all the while openly copying everything that I did. Circulating lies about me to destroy me or take me out--because why be your own unique person when you can just ape someone else's entire authentic life and just take out your competition. How quick they were to ostracize me from my own friendship circles the instant that opportunity became available.

I, of course, am not a blameless uwu babyangel. I did not have good or controlled responses to things--something that they very much weaponized against me later. What I am saying is that nothing exists in a vacuum and my extreme reactions and blow ups did not come out of no where. They can pretend to be perfect victims, but I  certainly will not.

I know it's such a dumb thing to think about now, but one of the things these "friends" and later former friends would do was to mock my art. I remember almost taking it to heart, but then being grounded in the reality that I was already doing art professionally as a teenager. It's also interesting to see that neither of them improved very much since high school in the art dept. Maybe if they'd spent more time focusing on their own shit, lol......

It breaks my heart to look at these photos, knowing that the world was so cruel to this little girl.

I am so proud of my features now because I look so much like my favourite person. 💗💖💕

From an early aged, we are conditioned to believe that other women and girls are our competition. We are lead to believe that we are supposed to cater to certain gazes, be picked, and to climb to the top by stepping over everyone else--and failure to do so means that we are not worthy. We are force fed a narrative of the scarcity mindset, one that spills over into every facet of our lives--from our romantic relationships to careers. 

Calling someone else ugly, regardless of it being true or not, does not make you more attractive.  Making fun of someone's art doesn't make yours any better. Someone else having something that you do not doesn't take anything away from you. I am so sad that I lost so much of my life to other people's insecurities. I look at myself now, and I look back on those old pictures of me and I see someone who was really hurting. I see someone who tried to make herself as small as possible, to the point of being invisible, because other people couldn't stand my light.

Your insecurities are not my problem. You cannot make them my problem. I will not longer tolerate you trying to burden me with your insecurities because you feel bad about yourself.

 All my life, I was made to believe that I was ugly. It turns out, there was nothing wrong with me. There was only ugliness in other people they tried to make my problem.