1dietcokeinacan:

Hello my love. I’m sorry it took me a few days to get to this – I needed to sit with it for a while, needed to mull it over with care, in order to figure out the best way to honor the sincerity of your question without indulging in its skewed logic.

My gut reaction is to say: yes, of course it’s okay, of course you are okay, my sweet. But to answer so simply would mean to legitimize the grounds on which your question is based, and I cannot do that and respond honestly.

Because honestly, the way you see yourself is a projection. The way you conceive of your face and your body, your worldly proportions, is a projection you have woven throughout your years in an attempt to settle on your youness. I know the world is cruel, and I know that seeing yourself as something undesirable feels comfortable – it’s part of how you’ve always made sense of yourself in your surroundings. But dwelling on your supposedly “inherent” nature – your ugliness, as you define it – only gives further credence to the institutions that tell you to hate yourself, that you resent but nonetheless listen to. In other words, the more you worry over whether being ugly is okay, the more you convince yourself the question is a viable one, an accurate measure of your person. And let me be clear here: it ISN’T. It never will be.

You feel so richly, and you experience so vividly, and you love what you love with such fervor – there is beauty there, everywhere, in everything you do. When you are immobilized from the fear of what others may think of your outsides, you stop seeing how gorgeously they reflect your insides, and vice versa, and vice vice versa, over and over again. You turn yourself into a single dimension. You do not deserve to think of yourself that way. You are worthy of your wholeness.

I know this probably wasn’t the response you wanted from me, but I just want to reiterate that there is no satisfactory response to “Is it okay if I am ugly?”…You will never find solace in an answer to a question that is placing that kind of value judgment on your personhood; either way you are setting parameters on what you deserve and how you deserve to think of yourself before you even get a response. I refuse to engage with that kind of resignation born from insecurity – what a disservice it would be to you, in all your nuance, in all your beautiful messiness.

I love you to bits. Let me know if you want to keep talking about this. I’m always here🧡