"Ugly" is a word that should be deleted from all languages if it's used to describe people and their physical features.
I grew up hearing this word used against me time and time again by people who called themselves my friends and white kids who didn't like brown-skinned girls with facial hair. The internal shit storms that resulted in being constantly insulted in this way ended up creating some pretty challenging external shit storms in my life as I grew into adulthood. For one, I started behaving like those who called me ugly and heaped this word and words like it onto my friends when I began university. Then, in Japan, I publicly humiliated a good friend at the time by shouting disrespectful language including <ugly> at him in a very public place. We were in Tokyo and out clubbing in Roppongi. My mouth left nothing to the imagination and spitted out vile verbiage. Other friends were with us. They were shocked into silence for fear that I might turn on them. My friend kept his cool and didn’t say much. But I knew then and know now that my abuse deeply affected him.
It is true : that when nasty things happen to us, and we are unable to fight back, we keep it in until the pressure causes a blow up or a meltdown. My friend, I believe, might have guessed that my hatefulness that night wasn’t about him. I was calling myself that ugly human, and that night, I was showing my ugliness, my narcissistic tendencies. I could have better directed my anger to something that brought me and my friends joy. I apologized to him in the proceeding days, but the damage had been done. In the years ahead, I once again found myself the target of people’s coarse criticism well into my late 30s/early 40s.
It is something that I will carry in me for the rest of my life no matter how many people tell me I'm not. I don't take compliments about how I look well and this is the reason for it. And please, don't tell me I'm not ugly, because that's not the point. I'm not looking for sympathetic praise. The indignity of being told "you're ugly" was not only a recurring threat in my childhood. It was even more disgusting when I suffered through adults acting out their immaturity in this regard, humiliating me in front of people I loved.
I was never a huge fan of Seinfeld, but once I watched that episode about the "two-faced girlfriend" where Seinfeld is with a woman whose face appears to shift from attractive to not-so-attractive according to Seinfeld and his male friends. What a shitty piece of comedy that ridicules the maturity of a woman's face!
Those shifts in facial appearance represent the maturity we all inevitably grow into. Our lives become more complicated, messy at times...we feel and think about things more deeply. Many of us no longer wear that childhood innocence. Of course, it might reappear during various moments that remind us of the child within. What our faces present to the world is a soul/spirit/essence who has simply lived, survived, and thrived. An entity created from the dust of the universe and put on this earth to move through life cycles of happiness, pain, confusion, loss, tragedy, regret, retribution, (dis)ability, and all the other labyrinthine circumstances and emotions that continually transform us from one way of being to another, from one way of looking to another.
To label these shifts in people, sometimes even within seconds like the character in that fucked up Seinfeld episode, and call them "ugly" is doing a serious disservice to humxnity. We will never evolve as a species unless we stop denying the gift of that vital beauty in all of us. The beauty of growth and aging...the beauty of our childhood memories running through our blood to remind us at times of who we were/are and all the brilliant ways stardust has changed us.
There are no ugly faces in this world. We are people with stories to tell.
