ISKRIBOL (Mga Suka ng Isang Bored na Otistik)

Suka #120

My situation with my girlfriend now is quite complicated. You see, we broke up five years ago and got back together last March. The events that happened in that span of five draining years range from wildly hilarious to deeply painful. I'll talk about the deeply painful.

I'll lay out the facts first. My girlfriend is beautiful. I'm ugly (but I'm going to contradict myself later). You get the point. Our entire relationship has been headlined with the gnawing, consistent feeling that she is too good for me. Worse, that idea isn't just my insecurities verbalized. People around us always make me feel that she's too good for me. Her family actually said that to me when we broke up five years ago. They made it clear. I'm ugly. She's beautiful. We can't be together.

Her friends think the same thing, too. They always ask her, "Why him?" like they can't come up with any reason how she left her ex-lover who was far too good-looking for someone like me. Imagine me hanging out with them with this knowledge. Imagine the dread and this cold pain on my neck that I always feel when they're around. They've already judged me and I can't blame them. My face is not at par to their standards.

Others think that I'm lucky, that I hit the jackpot, that I will never have the right now to dump her because that will be ungrateful of me, that I can't hurt her feelings because, apparently, ugly people can't do that. "Your girlfriend is beautiful," they always say like it means, "Why is she hanging out with you?"

This is where my point stems from. You see, I didn't choose to be ugly. I was born with this face. It was only when her family said it five years ago that I felt wrong wearing this face. It's been seven months since we got back and I felt wrong for seven months. I'm not really angry. I'm confused. How did it come to the point that my DNA, passed down from generations to generations, is now a social burden? How the shape of my face, the proportion of my eyes, length of my nose, the color of my skin, feel like an original sin. How I grew up thinking that I am enough only for society to tell me that my face is the paramount measure of my whole worth as a person; that I was demoted from unique to ugly.

We have been conditioned to think that white skin is the perfect skin; the darker, the lesser you are as a person; that pointed nose is the perfect nose; that anything that looks Western-ish is the paragon of human beauty. If you're not white, then you must be morena or you must have foreign blood mixed in your veins. If you have darker skin, then your nose must be pointed for people to label you "black beauty" because, apparently, beauty comes in colors.

It is enough bullshit to still think beauty is in the eyes of the beholder or true love sees what's inside. People only say that for comfort.

Her friends didn't ask her "Why him?" when she was with her good-looking ex-lover. The face says it all, I think. I've imagined that we go around walking with this big price tag on our faces that shows our worth. Screw your personality, your attitude, your soul. Nobody gives a shit what you can talk about when you run out of small talk.

I have nothing against good-looking people because like me, they are born with it. But I will say fuck you to people who judged me on face value, to people who summed up my being by looking at my face, to people who constantly asked "Why?" every time they see us together.

I don't owe anyone answers to their "Why"s but I owe defense to people who went through the same.

If you noticed, I called them "good-looking people", never "beautiful".

If you noticed, I called my girlfriend "beautiful" because she is and I don't mean her face.

I'm not ugly. I reject the idea of ugliness. No one is a lesser person just because his face does not meet your concept of beauty.

I am beautiful. Fuck you.