Oh so Pretty

Last week I got a telling off from my therapist. She scolded me for writing that I was not a pretty girl. She asked me to interrogate this idea before our next session. Our next session is in approximately one hour. There is clearly a significant amount of reluctance in me to look at this issue. I like a deadline, but this is taking things a little too far, even for me.

I have been thinking about it. I just haven’t organised my thoughts. That’s what the writing is for. I could say I’ve been busy, but that’s a lie. I have been wrestling with myself. I’m not sure which me is winning but maybe writing about it will decide.

When I look at old photos of me as a little kid, I can objectively see that I was, in fact, quite pretty. So what made me think that I wasn’t? Probably my time in the trenches at primary school, where my experiences were pretty grim. I was bullied because I was different and I think I just assumed that my physical appearance was part and parcel of that difference. Looking at it now I expect it was far more abstract. I was just a strange kid in a school and at a time that valued a level of uniformity that was so far out of my reach it might as well have been on the moon. I think the other kids felt the difference in me and then everything I did, said and was were just opportunities to exploit that otherness. It was equal opportunity bullying. My appearance was just part of the whole.

Later, as I got awful, National Health glasses, cut my own hair and toted my mum’s home made bags to school, I became more of a clearly defined target for my appearance. Middle school was where I learned to truly believe I was ugly. I felt ugly and more than a few people took great pleasure in pointing out my physical defects. It was also a time of having boyfriends. I had one or two, but there were a few dates set up for me with boys who didn’t turn up. Back at school, everyone knew. These dates had been tricks. The message was clear. Who, in their right mind would want to date someone like you? It wasn’t even subtle. I was told, to my face. I got the message. I internalised it. I believed it.

Later, I learned to dress for myself and took more control over my appearance. I figured if I couldn’t be pretty and desirable, if nobody wanted me, then I would make myself happy. I didn’t feel pretty, but I did feel stronger and more confident. I had seen an illustration of a girl in Just Seventeen magazine, a girl wearing oversized dungarees, with a tousled top knot of hair. I wanted to be her. I figured out ways I could dress more like that, more like I felt on the inside.

When that happened I started to get boyfriends. Often, the boyfriends I got were problematic. I had a long history of dating boys who would later turn out to be gay or addicts. I had an equally long history of dating boys who really wanted to date my best friend. I learned that when I fell for a boy, there would usually be a time when they would either a) come out or b) tell me how much they fancied my friend. If they were addicts, they usually wanted someone to blame or someone to save them. This helped to cement my belief that I wasn’t pretty enough to be loved for myself, and that I was mostly useful to boys for what I could do or who I could help them to be. It taught me that I should be grateful for what I could get, boy wise. I figured any boy was better than no boy. I figured wrong, but it took me a long while to work that one out. This time also helped me build an enduring belief that I was in all likelihood, a gay man trapped in the body of a girl. None of these beliefs was terrific for my self esteem.

At around this point of my adolescence I started buying fashion magazines. I would cut out all the women I thought were beautiful and made an enormous collage that covered two walls of my bedroom. I went to bed every night, surrounded by images of beauty that I could not achieve and desperately wanted. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have access to that kind of fashion and I didn’t look like any of those girls.

There is a photo of me at that time, standing in my room, posing against the backdrop of all those women. It was just after my breakdown, at about the point I unconsciously decided to stop growing up. I dug the picture out this week and looked at it again. I look great. I was so pretty and I didn’t think for one second that I was. I feel so sad for that girl.

That girl learned that beauty was only available to her through external means. It was the bedrock of the next few decades of surrounding myself with beautiful objects and nicer and nicer clothes. It was the beginning of the years spent honing an appreciation of aesthetics that would be my proxy when it came to beauty. I might not be beautiful, but I could surround myself with beauty. It went some way to satisfying my needs.

A few years before I finally got a hysterectomy, which stopped me being an invalid 90% of the time, I discovered drag queens. I love drag. I was obsessed with it for a while. I felt a total connection with these men who wanted female beauty and had found a way to make it happen for themselves. I wanted to be a drag queen for a long time. I looked at how they transformed themselves and felt genuine awe. After surgery, when my body became my own again for the first time since I had taken up the cudgels of fertility and child bearing, I slimmed down and celebrated my recovery by having a huge Drag Race party. I felt so beautiful then. It is one of the few times I remember looking at myself and feeling genuinely delighted with the woman I had made myself into. I carried that aesthetic forward into my new life for a long time. When I dressed as if I were a drag queen, I felt like the beautiful woman I had wanted to be. There is a lot to unpack there in terms of my gender identity.

Then my family life fell apart and dressing as a drag queen seemed frivolous in the face of what I was dealing with. I lost myself again. I didn’t feel pretty. I didn’t feel like myself. I think I probably felt like everything that happened was a kind of punishment for daring to care about myself and how I looked. It wasn’t all that but the very Catholic sense of God smiting me for taking pleasure in myself and being frivolous was definitely in the mix.

Now I am starting again. This last few weeks I have been practicing the basics, looking at myself in the mirror is something I’m learning to do again. Thinking about myself as pretty now isn’t easy, but it is easy to go back and acknowledge that I was pretty then. That makes it easier to think that I can think that again and maybe do it in real time instead of in hindsight this time. I’m aiming for progress, not perfection.