Please Feel Free to Ignore This Post

I don't think I'm pretty. I mean, I've been told I'm good-looking but I don't see it.

My mom is just a few melanin cells this side of "day-glo albino" and my dad looks like basically any one of the guys in this picture.

As stupid as it sounds to anyone with even a cursory background in genetics, though, I didn't know I wasn't white until I was about ten. I was operating under the assumption that, since all baby animals looked like their mothers, I must look like my mother, too.

But, naturally, when you mix just-shy-of-albino-looking and poster-complexion-for-native-american you get something in between.

So, basically, I'm complexion confused.

I spent the first ten years of my life with this image in my head of how I looked and, when I realized I actually don't look like my mom it shattered my worldview. For the record, borderline-albino plus native american gets you passably-asian.

But I though I was white.

Here I am, thinking I'm white, for all of my life, and when I found out I wasn't I really didn't like the way I actually looked.

The way I looked in my head to begin with is so wrong, so innacurate a picture of what I actually look like, and I intellectually know that, but I can't rectify the error in my head. I actually got in trouble at school once when I was in kindergarten or first grade, in art class. We had to draw self-portraits, and the teacher handed out those ethnic-colored crayons and handed me a light brown one, and I wanted the peach, but she wouldn't give it to me because I didn't have peach skin.

I left the skin of my self-portrait uncolored.

When I wake up in the morning, I still think I have this nice, light, creamy complexion and it's beautiful.

Until I look at myself in the mirror, at which point I go, "Ugh. So tan!"

Not that there's anything wrong with tan, mind you. It's just now how I look.

I also used to be anorexically skinny, and I hated it. There was this girl in my freshman PE class who whold "accidentally" bump into me, bumping me into the lockers, and make snide comments about how disgusting I looked. I thought I looked disgusting, too. I don't think it's attractive for a lady's ribcage to show. I don't think you should be able to see someone's spine stretch their shirt when they lean over their desk. It's gross. I always though the ideal body type for a lady was curvy and soft, like the Venus de Milo.

Of course, if a lady has to choose between looking like that or arms, she should go for the arms, but still. I'm a huge fan of hips and breasts and a gentle sloping waist instead of that disgusting hourglass thing they're always trying to push on us. I just hated the body type I had in high school, for the opposite reason most of my classmates hated theirs.

I've been told, you see, that I'm flat-chested, and that when I wear a padded bra, it's false advertisement. A disappointment, when you find out what's under my shirt.

Somehow, in the last two years, I acquired the Venus look and then kept going. My body doesn't look anything like I think it should, now. Beyond the whole complexion thing, the build of my body is different in a way I never pictured my body being. I'm really not sure how to deal with this.

Back in the day, I was young and cute and precocious. I'm not so young anymore. I'm actually pretty proud to be a passable excuse for a grown-up. But I miss being cute. I miss not looking so tired and jaded, so that my eyes had a little more sparkle. I miss being slender enough that I could slip into tight spaces, and cute enough that just looking at someone would stop them in their tracks. I'm not really precocious anymore; I'm just another angsty twenty-something dissatisfied with life.

I feel like every word that has ever been used to describe me no longer applies.

This little girl T, this sweet young thing that Poffle may or may not be after, she's beautiful in ways I am not, and wish I were. She has this glowing, smooth, peach-toned skin with just a teensy bit of tan that sets her eyes off. Her eyes, my god, they're huge and wide open all the time, and even looking at pictures of her makes me shudder because it's like she's looking into my soul. (Sidenote: I don't stalk her; we're facebook friends. So there.) She has this gorgeous light brown hair that's generally wavy like I wish my pin-straight hair was. I've permed my hair twice in my life, trying to achieve that effect, but it just doesn't work on anyone but her. She's maybe 5'1, tops, but probably 5' even. I could reach around her with one arm, but even though she's so slender, she has gorgeous curves in perfect proportion to her frame, and I'm jealous.

I wish I looked like her.

I've been told I'm cute, but I don't see it. I'm not tiny and pocket-sized anymore, if I ever was, and even if I were the majority of my female friends back when I heard these words more frequently came up to my chin, if that. They're smaller and cuter, and usually smarter (but not always) and generally sweeter of temperament. I don't get how I can be cute when that's what I'm surrounded by.

Poffle's sisters (he has three) are all built the same way as T, more or less. They're fair-haired an -skinned. They're curvy exactly like Venus, and they have jaw-dropping eyes. How can I expect to measure up? Hell, his mother looks exactly like her girls.

My sister, she has dark hair like me, and she's a little curvier than the statue, but has alabaster skin like you wouldn't believe, and she wears her body so well on her soul I've never left the house with her and not seen heads turn her way, even when she's in baggy jeans and overlarge t-shirts.

Chickadee, The Chickadee, is so beautiful inside and out. She always moves with such grace and poise. Just being around her for the few hours I was when I went back West a couple weeks ago, it infected me with acceptance of challenges and grace to survive. Every time I'm in her presence, every movement is a dance. Just thinking about her makes me sigh, for all the inner beauty shining through the broken frame, but I'm so jealous of her and her blessings that it makes me all ugly inside.

I have a tendency to trip over flat surfaces. I walk into furniture in my office all the time, a room in which I've spent a minimum of 27 hours a week, every week, for the last seven months.

I'm so jealous of all these women, these beautiful women with their dancer's grace and fair skin and statuesque bodies. I know I'm okay-looking. But compared to them? They're so beautiful, so kind and intelligent and loved in ways that I wish I was, and never will be. (Okay, the love thing fluctuates, but everything else really doesn't.) I can't stand being around them sometimes, because I feel like last choice.

I can count backwards by lovers, and tell you every time I was second-choice for someone and who she was that I was an acceptable-at-best substitute for.

Beautiful. Fair. Curvaceous. Smooth. Graceful. Talented. Kind. Cute women.

I know I shouldn't be comparing myself to others, but shy of bleaching my skin and some serious bone-reconfiguration, I'll never look the way I think I look the first thing in the morning, before I catch my reflection in the mirror, and after all these years the shock of my physical reality has yet to wear off, but I wish, just once, I could wake up and see my reflection looking exactly how I see myself.

I need to stop. I need to stare at myself in the mirror for five minutes every day and look at myself and just say out loud "You are beautiful, inside and out," but what happens when my body changes again? How do I start over from that? How do I deal with this?

How do I accept the kind of beautiful I actually am, instead of pining to be what I see in my head?