It is incredibly hard to be ugly. This pain of it is not really acknowledged in our society. Having at least reasonable looks is a privilege. I spent much of my life as ugly and it was really hard. My mother told me over and over that I was very attractive. But when my sister was having a fancy wedding, I got a call from both my mom and my sister to make sure that I would be OK with getting serious makeup work done before the wedding pictures were taken. This was clearly really, really important to them. Oh. So that is the truth. The makeup artist proceeded to plaster on as much makeup as you would do for a stage performer. To the makeup artist’s credit I think it did really help. I’m sure my mom thought it was important to hide the truth from me, but it didn’t really help me. I really had a serious problem and pretending that I didn’t (until it was time to take wedding pictures) wasn’t helping any. I needed plastic surgery.
The problem was that I had already visited two plastic surgeons who had assured me that oh yes they could do wonders. They planed down the top millimeters of my skin. It was horribly painful to recover from and very expensive. The cost was not covered by insurance. And both of those plastic surgeons were completely lying. After all that pain and money there was almost no change. I’m not sure if the surgeons were coming from ignorance or greed, but they definitely were not telling the truth. So that led me to believe that the situation was hopeless and there was nothing I could do. The thing is there really were competent plastic surgeons out there that could have helped me I just didn’t make it enough of a priority to find them. And for that I needlessly suffered.
I notice that most people are comfortably somewhere in the middle of the bell curve on looks. So they don’t really know how hard it is to be ugly. This is a very real thing by the way. For example, researchers have repeatedly shown that good looking people get paid more and are given more promotions. And it really has a big impact on dating. Most people have a limit to how ugly a person they are willing to date. You probably do too. Be honest. For a while I thought, fine, I will just date ugly people. Ugly people unite! The problem with that was that being ugly really does a number on a person’s self esteem and that causes all sorts of problems in a relationship. And because you are so busy rejecting your own image in the mirror you also find yourself rejecting your ugly partner as well. Ultimately that strategy maybe could have worked, but there was a much better one. Find a competent plastic surgeon. And I did find one.
After taking an intense personal growth course in my mid thirties I found the strength to try yet another plastic surgeon. And this one really knew what he was doing. Instead of just dealing with the surface he got under the skin and worked on the bony scar tissue that had built up. Now we finally were getting somewhere! It was a really big help but it did not fully solve the problem. It was enough of an improvement that I finally found a partner, but there was still more to be done. However I didn’t address it until much later when I did that big workshop on my fiftieth birthday and recommitted to fully loving myself. Then I called that competent plastic surgeon to get a recommendation for a surgeon in the bay area where I now live and I got a really great recommendation. It turns out that there was a technique of injecting silicon that had been outlawed in a bit of an over reaction to the problem with silicon breast injections. It had just been allowed again and this surgeon was old enough to have done the injections before they were outlawed. This injection planted a little seed in the skin that encouraged the skin around it to fill in the pitted scars. It took a lot of injections that were very quite painful but boy did it work. We finished up with several courses of laser surgery and suddenly for the first time in my life since early high school I was attractive again.
When I found myself dating again in my mid fifties I can’t tell you how much a difference it made. Part of that was because I was much more confident but a lot of that confidence came from how many positive reactions I was now getting from woman. It was a self reinforcing loop but this time in a positive direction. So why did it take me so long to get this fixed? I was trying to hide from a hard truth. It was really hard to acknowledge how ugly I was. Understandable, but not really serving me. What I needed was to stop resisting the truth. Again with painful things like that we first need to accept them. Resistance is understandable but not helpful. And then have compassion. And then step into the full truth of the matter and choose our path from there. But getting to this truth is very tricky. We constantly have to be watching all the little tricks we are playing on ourselves to keep away from those hard truths. And that brings us back again to the practice of mindfulness.