A Comet Appears ✰

None of you were ugly.

The other day I found a class picture from fourth grade and I looked everyone in it, and then I saw the “ugly girl” – the one people constantly harassed, whose desk kids would pretend was contaminated, the one kids would invent complex songs about just to voice their disgust toward her.

And she looked like a normal little girl.

She looked no different than the rest of the class.

She was never ugly. And I know that you may be thinking to yourself “but I WAS ugly” – I just want you to consider for a moment that maybe you weren’t.

Maybe you were tormented by your peers for no reason except that they were experimenting with and learning the rules of callous human cruelty that would define the rest of their lives – and recognizing this, the adults who should have protected you, let it happen. Cruelty and social shaming – the foundations of how human beings police their society is learned and it is practiced.

Since I’ve become an adult, I don’t recall ever seeing an “ugly” kid. Kids are all just strange-looking works in progress that the artist seems to have abandoned intending to finish them later.

I want you to think about our racist and unhealthy “standards of beauty”. Are any of the things that society fixates on as “ugly” truly ugly? No. We take things that are beautiful and we associate them with ugliness and badness and coarseness – to control them – to batter the will of the already oppressed down to the point where they think the abuse they receive is justified.

The children who demeaned you were learning to crush the human spirit to the point where the target internalizes all that hate and keeps hating themselves even when the bullies are no longer there. Those children were learning the sadism that defines our social hierarchy – we live in a culture where success is achieved through exploiting others.

No one deserves to be treated that way. LGBT children shouldn’t grow up ashamed of themselves. Black children shouldn’t grow up thinking white children are inherently prettier.

You were not ugly. You were told you were ugly so that people could have an “excuse” to target you, to ostracize you, to other you, and to abuse you.

An “ugly child” wouldn’t know they were ugly until someone TOLD them they were. They don’t grow up ugly, they grow up emotionally abused.

And still if you feel that you were the exception and you were objectively and unquestionably so ugly as a child that everyone noticed – even if you feel you are still that ugly now…

That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve love. It doesn’t mean you won’t find love, and trust and happiness.

You are worthy of respect. You have worth. You have value.

And if the rest of the world doesn’t seem to notice your worth – look at the evil and vile things the world does value and count yourself lucky not to be among that number.

There are people who will see your worth. There are people who will look at you and not see “ugliness” – they will see a friend, a mentor, a hero and even, yes, a lover.

An Emoji Spell to Bring Your Heart’s Desires to Life During the Next Cycle of the Moon

Not me, but my mom.

In 1972, she ran away from home. She was gone for several months, and when she got home my grandmother started shaking her and screaming about how someone had told her my mother had no shoes and my grandmother was sure it meant my mom was dead.

She finally calms down, and they piece it together: my grandmother had gotten a phone call from someone who breathed two or three times, said “Cathy’s in bare feet,” and hung up. Except that’s not what they said–my grandmother had written the date in on her calendar, and on that date my mother was in Bare Feet, Arizona. She knew definitively that she was in Bare Feet because on that date she called home to talk to my grandfather, who told her Uncle Jim had died–“got himself shot”–and that she had missed the funeral. Ready for the glitch in the matrix part? Here we go:

–My grandfather had no recollection of the conversation–which would have been a strange conversation indeed, since Uncle Jim was still alive and, in fact, didn’t die until 2009, eight years after my grandfather. However, my mom did miss the funeral, thanks to a delayed flight. Cause of death? Supposedly, it was suicide, but there were enough indications for the family to believe that was a pile of horseshit, not least that shooting himself in the head with the rifle indicated would’ve been near-impossible.

–My mom was going by the name Patricia Danko when she was on the run–she had a fake ID and everything. She hadn’t called herself “Cathy” since leaving home and nobody knew she was traveling under an alias.

–According to my mom, she never gave a name for herself–either Patricia or Cathy–when she was in Bare Feet, and she would’ve had no reason to. Bare Feet had maybe a hundred people in it, and they were just stopping for food and gas.

–This isn’t just an account from my mother–my dad was with her at the time, and he remembers both the phone call and the truckstop.

But that’s not the weirdest nor the creepiest part, which is this:

–I’ve been trying for three years to find Bare Feet, Arizona–on the Internet, on old maps, by talking to old Arizona cowboys, and there was never a Bare Feet, Arizona. My mom convinced my dad to drive “through Bare Feet” on the way back from Texas in 2013 and there was no town anywhere along the highway, not even the abandoned bones of one. I’ve looked for Bare Feet, Barefeet, Bear Feet, Bare Feat, Bare Foot, Barefoot, and Bear Foot. None of these exist.