By Spring Wise.
When I was ten, there was a school disco. My auntie took me shopping and bought me the most beautiful dress I could imagine. It was black velvet and made me feel like an Old Hollywood movie star. I chose it, no one chose it for me. It was by far the most expensive outfit I’d ever owned. We’d been to Debenhams to get it, which felt very very posh at the time.
My mum blow-dried my hair for me, brushed it til it glowed, and put a matching velvet ribbon in it. I actually looked at myself in the mirror, really looked at my reflection, which I usually avoided. I looked…. real. I looked like my own creation. I felt DIVINE.
Until I arrived, of course. You all know what happened, you all know I never lived down wearing a black velvet dress to a school disco. I still don’t really understand what was so remarkable about that, but the way the other children said it “Who wears a BLACK VELVET dress to a disco??” told me I was beyond ridiculous. As usual, I looked fucking stupid.
I remember running to the toilets so I could cry my hot tears in private, because like fuck were any of them going to see me cry. I’d rather have died. They were tears of burning humiliation.
I had felt so beautiful in my mother’s bedroom just an hour before and so…. big. I filled the room. I looked as glamorous as she always did when she went out to fancy things, my auntie had told me the dress was perfect on me, and I’d believed them.
Oh, the humiliation that I had been foolish enough to believe I was pretty or good or deserving of nice things. Those children were just being ordinary little bitches, they had no idea what they did, and they’ll have never have thought about it again a day in their lives. It was the sport of the evening, that’s all.
But I remember. There’s a little prickle of it at the back of my eyes waiting to run into tears every time I let myself feel special. I felt it on my own wedding day, six years ago. Who am I to be the centre of attention when I’m clearly so ugly and undeserving?
Who would imagine that’s buried deep inside this absurd peacock of a person? I aggressively wear whatever the fuck I like, and I look marvellous or frumpy or embarrassing, but I look like myself and I’m not even really going anywhere with this.
Just know that every time I feel good about the way I look it’s in absolute spite of the thirteen years I spent at school being bullied for every single thing about me and each time I feel that insistent burning start up behind my eyes, I say FUCK YOU to every one of them.
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