When I was around 7 I learned what it was like to be hated f..

When I was around 7 I learned what it was like to be hated for how I look. A friend of mine invited me to play at the park after school, but later said actually she couldn’t anymore. I went riding around on my bike and then saw her with a bunch of other kids. I tried to join and they said there was already too many of them and I should just go home.

I asked her the next day at recess why they didn’t like me, she replied “you’re too pretty.”

In grade 6 the most popular boy at school asked me to the dance, it was the first one I went to (I wasn’t allowed to go to these things but I begged my mom). Girls surrounded me there and turned out it was a trick. They laughed and said “you actually believed he wanted to go with you?!” I didn’t leave the bathroom until it was over.

I would get weird comments from men, and downright mean comments from girls. In grade 10 some older girls offered to pluck my “ugly eyebrows” and told me not to look until the end. The girl plucked them all out.

In grade 11 I got beat up because someone else’s boyfriend looked at me too long.

I started trying to look less pretty. I would wear baggy and weird clothes. Cut my long hair to a short bob and would wear thick framed glasses to hide my eyes.

I wouldn’t hang out with people, and I didn’t trust them. I would ski, alone. Hike alone. Go out after dark and walk my dog every night alone. At a party I went to near the end of grade 12 the person who drove me there told me to “just wait here for a sec, I have to go check something” and a few minutes later a group of girls came up to the van and started yelling things and shaking the vehicle back and forth. Everything felt like a trap.

It took me a really really long time before I could embrace my self or how I look. The confidence I have now, took me having a daughter of my own and never wanting her to feel about herself, the way I had for so long. I never want her to hate how she looks just because other people do, or downplay herself for the insecurity of others.

When I say I hated this face for the better part of 40 years I really mean that. I have spent the last three years making up for that. And I’ve noticed whether I had the lowest self esteem or the confidence I have now I’ve noticed no change in how those kinds of people see me, people who do not love themselves will hate anything that they perceive bruises their own egos.