15-year-old Fay looking into the mirror
Green eyes, soft brown hair in braids, a soft curl to the stray hair.
“ERGH, I hate it, I hate how I look”
“I wish I could wear classes and look geekier, then maybe people would stop labelling me as pretty and cute. I could be considered a smart girl instead”
Fay was slim and had gotten curves early.
She knew she was considered beautiful and would often turn heads.
She remembered an incident, where she was walking with her dad in the streets, and a guy in a car with his girlfriend or a lady friend next to him, pulled his head out the window to comment on her ass.
Didn’t he know she was 15 and walking with her dad?
And how did his girlfriend feel about this?
Why couldn’t they just stop looking.
It wasn’t her fault, that she came out the way she did, of how she was born.
It wasn’t just that they would look very inappropriately, they would also sometimes try to steal a kiss, slap her on her ass or come with crude comments about what they would like to do to her.
Even her mom’s friend and to make matters worse her dad’s friend had attempted to kiss her.
Fay haven’t even had a boyfriend yet, not really anyway. She had no interest in playing kissing games or what should be normal her age.
She liked Fashion at her age and wanted to be able to dress the way she liked to dress, not have to worry about how others would react to what she was wearing or how they treated her.
She remembered another incident, where her mother had bought her a really cool looking outfit.
White trumpet pants with a matching top that showed her belly. She loved that outfit and had worn it one day at the playground with her friends.
She had been 13 years old.
A girl down the street a few years older than her, and her boyfriend and his friends walked by.
Suddenly this girl started shouting that Fay had flirted with her boyfriend.
She hadn’t even looked at the guy, but the girl was convinced that fay in her new outfit had tried to seduce this stranger.
She had ended up being beaten up, and after that experience she didn’t want to wear that outfit again.
She had learned quickly that she had to be careful of how she would dress.
To not wear too much makeup or to not smile at strangers.
It wasn’t just the unwanted attention she got, that was annoying.
She also felt that because she looked innocent and cute, people would assume, she was just this sweet not so bright girl.
She loved learning and reading books, but people always assumed that she was just a pretty girl.
She would happily be considered book smart then have her whole personality defined by her looks.
It wasn’t fair.
19-Year-old Fay looking in the mirror.
“Should I put makeup on? Or just leave the house without?”
Fay and her friends were going out drinking, and she was excited. She couldn’t wait to hang out with her friends. Maybe if she was lucky end up in a conversation about deeper topics, like psychology, or debate the existence of life, and if there were life on other planets.
Fay lived for those conversations. It would spark her imagination, and she would learn so much about how others thought about these things.
But she feared that she would get unwanted attention again.
She just wanted to be free. Free to be herself, truly herself, and not have to deal with flirty boys, who expected more. Who would grab her ass and try to dance really close to her.
She knew she was attractive and with that came power.
She had once done something she was embarrassed about
She had asked the bartender if she could have a free drink if she flashed him. He eagerly said yes, and after it was done, she had gotten a free drink.
It was wrong, so wrong, and she didn’t like that feeling.
Even though she constantly got told by her friends that she should use this to her advantage, that she was lucky to be pretty.
She had even stumbled upon an article once that said that pretty girls would get father in life. Be luckier getting jobs and more opportunities.
It wasn’t fair. It shouldn’t be like that. It wasn’t something that should be important or off value.
What should matter if a person was a good person or not. Their personality, how they interacted with people around them.
“I just want people to see me for who I am, not for how I look. To look past the cute face and see that I’m intelligent, kind, and eager to learn new things” With a sigh, she looked away from the mirror, knowing full well that it was of no use, people saw how she looked as the first impression.
Later they would come to see past how she looked and get to know who she really was, but she knew she had to fight a little harder for that.
It was still hard to shake the label of just being cute, pretty and innocent.
She decided to leave the house without makeup, hoping it would help hide her away a bit. Become a bit more invisible.
29-year-old Fay looking into the mirror
And quickly looked away again.
Feelings of shame and disgust flooded her mind.
After the age of 19 she had come up with this genius idea, so dress less, to never wear makeup, and later it ended with her stopping to care at all about her looks.
She had gained over 60 kilos and was now considered obese.
It had worked for a while.
People around her would stop slapping her in the butt, they would stop shouting inappropriate things, and they would stop seeing her as just pretty.
She had had a chance to develop her personality.
To feel freer and truer to herself.
But she hated how she looked now, she hated how she felt.
She wanted to feel pretty again, just for herself, to wear what she wanted to dress in, to wear makeup again, but she was still too scared to care for herself.
If she got thin again and looked pretty again, then the attention would come back, and she didn’t think she could live with that kind of attention again.
Every time someone had slapped her ass or said inappropriate things to her, she felt an even bigger shame, and rage.
Rage over her past.
Rage that she had been sexually abused by her foster father at the age of 12.
Her lawyer telling her at 18 that she thought he did it because he had in a twisted way fallen in love with her at that age.
Her remembering her mom and dad’s friends who would try to steal a kiss.
She WAS not property that people was allowed to touch whenever they felt like it.
She WAS a human being with feelings and boundaries, with a care for the world and those around her, eager to learn about the world and wanting to live a normal life, but no one seemed to care about that. No one would ever see past her beauty, as a person.
She would rather any day be obese.
At least she was left alone to be herself.
She just wished that she would grow to love how she looked now.
She still felt she was staring into a stranger’s eyes.
The person in the mirror wasn’t her.
37-year-old Fay looking into the mirror.
“Hello there beautiful” She winked at herself.
A lot had happened the last 8 years.
She now longer felt ashamed of how she looked.
She dressed for herself, and only herself.
She had learned to set healthy boundaries for herself and had learned how to handle unwanted attention.
She was still overweight but felt comfortable in her skin now.
She noticed her first grey hair and thought it to be rather charming.
She laughed “I cannot believe I used to be scared of getting grey hair”
She wanted to get back into shape, to take care of how she looked, but mostly for her own health.
She wanted to dress in a style, she liked. At the moment it was gamer clothes.
Black comfortable pants, with gaming related text on her t shirts.
She even started to wear makeup, and wanted to experiment more with a different style of clothing.
She had to learn how to apply makeup, how to dress for the occasion and how to apply skincare.
For years she had neglected how she looked and felt a little embarrassed not knowing the basics at the age of 37, but then again it was never too late to learn.
She remembered the slight embarrassing encounter with the lady in the makeup store when she asked for help with finding a cream for her skin and a bit of foundation that would match her skin tone.
The lady had asked her so many questions about if she wanted night-time or daytime makeup and cream.
Fay had just awkwardly said “For the whole day I think?”
Then the lady had started trying to explain what she meant, and fay still felt a little lost and picked the 24-hour cream and a foundation.
When she applied the foundation for when she was recording herself for her videos, she had no idea if she did it right.
But practise makes perfect right? She thought.
She knew she had a lot to learn, but she was also eager to learn.
She wished she had learned what she learned over the last few years, when she was a teenager.
So, she wouldn’t have to feel so bad about feeling beautiful for almost her entire life.
That her beauty had been more of a curse then a compliment.
She knew if the wrong attention she had gotten hadn’t happened then she would likely not have felt it to be a curse.
She still occasionally got the kind of attention when she was streaming on twitch but had learned to stop it quickly. Set a firm boundary when it went to far.
Today she was just Fay – or else known as MissFaylyn, not just that pretty cute girl over there.
TODAY
Today I’ve learned a lot about myself.
But I still have a long way to go.
One of the things I want to learn is to feel beautiful not for others but for myself.
I do feel that way today, but I want to get to the point where I can wear a really beautiful dress and makeup one day, where I can feel comfortable in it, and not feel like I’m too exposed.
I still struggle a little with feeling too pretty, from how I grew up thinking when I was young.
To me it really was a curse, something that felt bad, and something I had to hide away, to stop the wrong kind of attention from people around me.
I have learned to set healthy boundaries, and when people tell me I’m pretty, I don’t get angry anymore but can take it as a compliment.
How people dress and how they look is something I don’t really care too much about, as I see it, its for them. If they feel happy and comfortable that’s all that matters.
I see the person I talk to not if they have red hair or brown.
The person behind the exterior is what I see, and what I appreciate.
To me today, how people are as people is true beauty to me.
My past taught me one thing that I appreciate to this day.
And that is my ability to see the person, not how they look, its something that helps me take that extra step to ask questions when I meet a new person.
Learn more about them as people, and not judge how they are by how they look.
I’m still not a fan of the media today.
Commercials, and programs that tell us that we should look beautiful, wear antiwrinkle cream, cover the white hair, get a face lift or surgery.
Make ourselves into something we are not just because society deems us not pretty enough and that the main goal is to be beautiful.
If people do it just for themselves that’s great, but if it’s because they feel less of what society think they should be, that’s not okay
Every one of us is beautiful in my eyes.
We all shine bright, our different personalities and individual uniqueness, and that SHOULD be celebrated. Who we are as people. Our quirky sides, and all the other sides we have.
That’s where the beauty is, and not how we where born, or what our genes gave us.
MissFaylyn out…
Have an amazing night and be the beautiful human being you are! 🙂
Missfaylyn 