The Ugly Little Duckling

i wanna be adored

tavi chhay

Ever since I was a little ducking, all I’ve wanted is to be swan. I went through all the weird, awkward phases throughout middle and high school. I don’t think I necessarily cared all that much about beauty as an ideal. I just wanted the boys at school to stop being so volatile towards me. I wanted to be treated with a kind of gentleness; I wanted to be pretty. That’s where I learned how much of a currency beauty was.

I had something of a glow-up toward the end of high school. I had turned into a swan, but I left without ever being asked out or dating anyone. I missed out on formative moments—the puppy love that prepares you for navigating real relationships: your first kiss, your first relationship, getting asked to prom. In that exact order. As you can assume, I was a late bloomer. I eventually experienced all my firsts. I lost my virginity during my senior year to a strange fella who went to Macalester. That’s a whole other can of worms. It wasn’t a beautiful experience, not the way I had imagined it would be. It was rough and painful. My whole body ached. My mother told me beauty is pain. I remember lying there afterward, wondering why I didn’t feel beautiful. I had just shared what was supposed to be one of the most intimate experiences you could have with another person, but I still didn’t have the beauty I had spent my whole life chasing.

I’ve grown up. I’ve become desirable. Men ask me out; men want to fuck me. I’m a slut; I’m a nymphomaniac. He tells me how much he loves the way I make him feel in bed. I’m pretty now, aren’t I? I have everything I once thought would make me beautiful, and somehow, I feel emptier than ever. I want so badly to know what it’s like to have someone see me as wholly, utterly beautiful. You desired my body, but not my soul. Pretty enough to fuck, but not to love. Tell me, what about me is ugly, is rotten, is unlovable? I’ll make myself prettier.

I write because I want to show how pretty I am inside; to prove that I’m not suffering for no reason, that I can make something beautiful out of something painfully ugly. Maybe if I make something pretty, it will make me pretty too. I need to do something to cope with how ugly I feel.

I like to believe I’m discerning and level-headed. I’m the most independent girl I know; I’ve never needed anybody. I’m not naive enough to believe that just because a man tells you how much he loves your body, or how often he wants to fuck you, it means he loves you. I thought I was smarter than this. But I let myself get hurt. Somewhere along the way, our relationship became more than sex. I felt important, I felt beautiful, I felt like I could be loved. And then it all came crashing down, it was too good to be true. In the part of me I don’t like to acknowledge, I’ve internalized the belief that I wasn’t made to be loved. Inside, I will always be an ugly little duckling. I can’t help thinking that this wouldn’t have happened if I were perfect, if he didn’t see something he didn’t like about me. Ugly things don’t happen to pretty people. You tell me how beautiful I am, but you make me feel like I’m anything but.

After spending years of my life trying to become beautiful, I cut my long black hair off with a pair of craft scissors in my bedroom, giving myself a lopsided bob. I was an ugly little duckling again. Some might ask, “Why would you give up your beauty like that?” I wasn’t sure how I expected to feel. I just wanted to do whatever I wanted with my body, without thinking about how desirable I appeared to someone else. I don’t feel ugly. I thought I might regret cutting it, but for the first time in a long time, I don’t care whether I am beautiful or not. And I suppose that is the story of the ugly little duckling.