I wanted to not be ugly.
Redefining who we are is worth it
When I was a little kid in Bedford, New Hampshire, I spent every Sunday morning waiting for my dad to pick me up from my mom’s house. I’d alternate between staring out the window of my ranch and copying the pictures from the Union Leader newspaper’s Sunday comics.
My mom would come over and say, “Nobody in this family is artistic.”
Art was not something I was supposed to do.
It was never something I even imagined I could do.
People still think I can’t do it. But I keep trying.
Nobody liked this one when I posted it on Facebook. But I like it.
When I was little, I’d spend most of my afternoons looking for Bigfoot out in the woods behind my house because my mom and stepfather worked. I never found him, but I kept looking and eventually decided that owning a really huge dog would be okay if I couldn’t find the actual Big Foot and convince him to move into our little brown haunted-looking house on the hill off the highway. We would make pancakes together. We would take long walks in the woods and not just make up stories but actually live them.
Do not judge. I was eight or something. When I believed in things, I believed hard.
I broached the idea about living with Big Foot with my mom. She said no. So, instead, I asked for a dog. I was super cunning. I told her I was lonely. I told her it would teach me about responsibility. I said the dog would keep me safe when they were at work.
She said, “This family doesn’t have big dogs. I can get you a poodle.”
I took the poodle. I named her Shelly Belly. God knows what I would have named a Bigfoot.
Shelly Belly didn’t say anything about whether or not anyone in the family was artistic. She just loved. She also took long walks in the woods and ate pancakes.
Like our podcast is called: dogs are smarter than people. That’s one of the major reasons why – most of the time, they just love.
I spend almost all my time trying to be a nice person. It’s always been like this; I kid you not. Like in fifth grade I was voted MOST COURTEOUS.
Carrie is polite.
Carrie is courteous.
Carrie is word-of-the day worthy.
But it wasn’t what I wanted to be, you know, right? Like I wanted to be Smartest or Prettiest or Class Clown or Most Athletic even though Most Athletic is something I could never be since I have zero hand-eye coordination. This is because I don’t really use my left eye to see. I had glasses when I was one year old and kept them all the way until fifth grade when I prayed to God every night to not have to have glasses in middle school.
There was this Dorothy Parker quote that says, “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” and that quote was like the word of God to me. I knew I would always be most courteous and not real superlative worthy unless I actually got rid of those damn glasses.
So I prayed. I prayed to God. I prayed to the universe. I prayed to anyone and everyone I could think of.
It was fifth grade. I was desperate.
At the doctor’s office, I sat in the chair and stared at the eye chart. It was all on my right eye, I knew. It had to perform at 100 % to get rid of those damn glasses.
The doctor was all, “Can you read this line?”
And I was all, “E.”
And he’s all, “Can you read this line?”
And I was all, “T.O.Z.”
He made an interesting noise, like he was impressed. “Go down as low as you can. Just keep reading each line. Start at the top. How about that?”
The phoropter was cold against my nose as I looked through it. “Okay.”
I took a deep breath and start from the top. “E F P T P Z L P E D.”
I went on and on. I could see them all
Sadly, the magical return of my eyesight didn’t make me magically popular as one boy (I will call him THAT BOY because we are Facebook friends now) reminded me at a sixth-grade dance at St Joseph’s, the one Catholic church in our town. We had one Catholic church, which was where some of the Irish and French Canadian kids went. We had one Protestant church, which is Presbyterian. That was it.
I secretly wanted to be Catholic because I loved how all the Catholic kids banned together and whined about going to religious classes on Wednesday nights and church on Sunday mornings. They hated CCD. They moaned about being altar boys and having to light candles and stuff. I thought this seemed amazing – like this secret society of awesomeness.
I wanted to be one of them so badly.
I wanted to belong, you know?
Like my older brother and sister, Bruce and Debbie? They were 14 and 15 years older than I am, which basically means that they are ancient. And back in sixth grade, they were all the way adult. My sister had babies. My brother had a job and a wife. My parents divorced when I was little so it wasn’t like I didn’t even grew up in the same family.
I wanted to belong.
I wanted to know who I was, to have a place.
So, when THAT BOY slow danced with me three times in a row at the CCD dance, I felt like I might actually belong.
But then he pulled away from me and said, “Carrie, let’s face it. Neither of us are lookers. So, we might as well make do with each other.”
I stepped out of his arms and I said one word, “What?”
“I’m saying… I’m saying… We’re not tens so we might as well make do.”
I cried and I ran away and hid in the bathroom. I didn’t come out even when THAT BOY’s mom, a freaking chaperone, came in to check on me. I didn’t come out until there wasn’t any music playing.
I ran out to my mom’s old Chevy Monte Carlo was waiting in the parking lot, wrenching open the door and slamming myself inside the red upholstered seat that everyone said looked like the inside of Dracula’s coffin.
“What is it?” Her smile went into the anger place where her lips were just straight lines.
I blurted out what THAT BOY said. With my mother, there was no pretending something bad hadn’t happened. There were no secrets, unless they were hers.
“That bastard,” she said.
“I’m ugly.” I sobbed that out somehow.
“You aren’t ugly,” she insisted. “That boy is ugly. His heart is ugly. He was working some line.”
But I knew in my heart that my mom was lying. I was ugly. I had to be.
I let THAT BOY define me. His words overtook everyone else’s.
And the thing is, no matter how many times I’ve heard people tell me I’m not, heard boys and girls call me cute or beautiful or lovely or pretty, I’ve never believed them. It’s THAT BOY’s words that I heard in my head, over and over again.
Neither of us are lookers.
We’re not tens.
This shouldn’t matter.
It freaking mattered.
Other people’s words echoed and echoed and shaped me until I didn’t even want to be in a photograph anymore. I was too afraid that the image of me that I saw would be even worse than I imagined.
But all that changed. I made it change. I decided to do art, do podcasts, not focus on not being super-model hot, to focus on becoming who I want to be instead of succumbing to my fears.
I turned off THAT BOY’s words in my head. I got big dogs once I was a grown up and I keep trying to chose people who make me feel less lonely.
I’m still a bit too polite though. :) But I also decided that I’m okay with that, that kindness and courtesy is a virtue no matter how much everyone acts like it’s a weakness.
Try This:
Think about the people that you define negatively. The ones that say things like: He’s a gossip. She’s a narcissist. She’s all over the place. He’s lazy.
Wonder if they really are the things you think they are.
Think about the ways people define you negatively. Realize those people are full of poop.
And now think this: How do you want to be defined? If you aren’t doing them already, maybe start doing the actions that make you that way.
LAST WEEK’S PODCAST
There’s a company in Sweden who is now run by a super fitness guy. He’s all in on the exercise. And when he took the company over, some people in the company quit. They were not all in, right? It was just an hour at 9 a.m. on Friday, but they were like hell to the now.
And it’s funny because in school and for a lot of us in college, exercise or sport was something that we had to do. It was play, right? We moved our body and cooperated (sometimes) and had fun.