I got nothin’ to do but today – Stephen Stills

No one likes to be called ugly. Someone has decided that they think a part of you, like your nose, is unpleasant to look at, and they’re letting you know about it. An insult like that can sting, but it’s just words, and with some practice and a healthy amount of self-respect, one should be able to shrug it off. You think I’m ugly? So what?

But what if the person calling you ugly is you?

What do you do then? It’s not possible to stoically ignore yourself like you would a deranged stranger on the street. And if you really do think you’re ugly, you must believe it’s true, which like organised religion is not something you can easily reason yourself out of. When we critique ourselves, painfully, we become both the attacker and the victim.

To get out of this uncomfortable bind, one has a few different options. Externally, you can change your appearance that is bothering you, in hopes that it makes you feel better or different. Take hair for example. You might change its colour, cut it, chemically restructure it into a different shape or attach someone else’s hair. Internally, you might disintegrate into shyness, avoid looking at your reflection or pretend you no longer care. Resisting, fighting and trying to remove our ugliness never seems to work very well and are temporary fixes at best.

Rather than trying to change, we need to embrace, love and accept ourselves. But how? In comparison to hacking away at our bodies, acceptance can appear to be passive and ineffective. What are we meant to do exactly? And how are we meant to love and accept ourselves if we are stuck with this thing we want to get rid of?

What we really want is removal, not acceptance, but accepting doesn’t need to be contingent with the ugliness disappearing. If it was, then it wouldn’t be acceptance. In practice, acceptance doesn’t really do anything with the ugliness. It’s still there, staring at us. But it does mean sitting there with it. We sit there, even as every molecule we are made of wants it to go away.

Over time, and with practice, you may even start to enjoy your ugliness. Enjoying doesn’t mean you necessarily want it to stay, but you have found some minute aspect that you’re okay with. It’s ugliness, but like other kinds of ugliness that we see in the world, we don’t need it to go. It still looks bad, like a stain on your trousers or a rubbish bin filled with dog poop, but deep down, you’re kinda okay with it.

And if one day, it finally does go way, you might not even notice.