📫 YOU WERE NEVER UGLY. 💔🌎🥹🔑

Beloveds,

Apparently somebody, somewhere, got appointed President of the International Committee of Who Gets to Be Beautiful.

Nobody remembers voting.

Yet somehow, human beings have spent generations walking around with imaginary clipboards deciding:

Too dark.

Too light.

Too fat.

Too thin.

Too loud.

Too quiet.

Wrong hair.

Wrong nose.

Wrong body.

Wrong clothes.

Wrong accent.

Wrong voice.

Wrong neighborhood.

Wrong country.

Wrong way of speaking.

Wrong way of moving through the world.

And some of us received those evaluations before we were old enough to understand that the people holding the clipboards did not actually have any authority.

I was eight years old when “ugly” became more than a word.

Children can learn very early which faces the world celebrates and which ones it mocks. They can learn who gets invited, who gets chased down hallways, who sits at the lunch table surrounded by laughter—and who learns how to eat while pretending being alone does not hurt.

Sometimes a child carries one careless word for decades.

Ugly.

That word can grow up with you.

It can follow you into mirrors.

Into photographs.

Into friendships.

Into dating.

Into marriage.

Into classrooms.

Into workplaces.

Into churches.

Into hospital rooms.

It can even follow you into recovery, when the body you finally learned to love suddenly moves differently, sounds differently, needs different equipment, or requires help doing things it once did without thought.

And that is why this conversation is bigger than beauty.

It is about belonging.

Because humanity has created thousands of sophisticated ways to say:

You would be easier for me to accept if you were a little less you.

Speak differently.

Straighten this.

Hide that.

Lose this.

Change that.

Fix your accent.

Lower your voice.

Control your face.

Make your body less noticeable.

Make your disability less inconvenient.

Make your Blackness less Black.

Make your culture easier for me to understand.

Make your faith quieter.

Make your doubt quieter.

Make your anger prettier.

Make your grief more comfortable.

Make yourself acceptable—

and then perhaps we will let you belong.

Nevertheless.

However.

What if belonging was never theirs to give?

🔑

What if the little girl somebody called ugly was never ugly?

What if the accent somebody mocked was never broken English?

What if the voice somebody dismissed was carrying wisdom they simply had not learned how to hear?

What if the wheelchair was not an eraser?

What if the cane was not a declaration of defeat?

What if scars were not disqualifications?

What if age did not subtract beauty?

What if different was never another word for deficient?

What if the problem was never the human being standing before us—

but the tiny measuring stick we were taught to use?

💔🌎

The world is heartbroken.

And sometimes we keep handing broken measuring sticks to one another.

That is one chain I desperately want us to break.

⛓️ You must look like this to be beautiful.

🔑 No. Human beauty was never manufactured from one template.

⛓️ You must sound like this to be intelligent.

🔑 No. Intelligence has accents.

⛓️ You must move like this to be whole.

🔑 No. Wholeness has wheelchairs, walkers, braces, prosthetics, canes, trembling hands, altered bodies and very creative ways of getting from here to there.

⛓️ You must believe what I believe to sit beside me.

🔑 No. Pull up a chair.

Believer.

Atheist.

Agnostic.

Questioning.

Certain.

Uncertain.

Still figuring the whole thing out.

Come sit.

My faith does not require me to make you smaller so God can be bigger.

I believe God so loved the world.

Not the polished world.

Not the attractive world.

Not the Christian-enough world.

Not the able-bodied world.

Not the English-speaking-with-the-approved-accent world.

The world. 🌎

And if you do not believe any of that?

You still get the chair.

Because you matter to ME.

Not because you agreed with me.

Not because you passed a theology examination.

Not because you became inspirational enough for somebody else’s story.

Not because somebody finally decided you were beautiful.

You matter because you are here.

Maybe somebody called you ugly.

Maybe nobody ever said the word aloud, but they taught it to you anyway.

Maybe they taught it through who they photographed.

Who they dated.

Who they hired.

Who they listened to.

Who they interrupted.

Who they believed.

Who they protected.

Who they mocked.

Who they called “professional.”

Who they called “articulate.”

Who they called “beautiful.”

And who they simply refused to see.

Beloved,

I cannot go backward and sit beside every lonely eight-year-old.

I wish I could.

But I can pull out a chair today.

I can tell the child.

The teenager.

The grown woman.

The grown man.

The elder.

The person staring at a body that has changed.

The person whose speech sounds different.

The person whose accent enters the room before anybody bothers learning their name.

The person who still avoids photographs.

The person who learned to make jokes about themselves before anybody else could.

The person who still hears an old insult when they look into a mirror:

That measuring stick was broken.

Throw it away.

🗑️

Actually—

put it in the recycling bin.

We are trying to be responsible citizens. 🤣🥰

Then come back over here.

We have chairs.

We have room.

We have work to do.

And we have an entire heartbroken world waiting to discover what might happen when human beings stop grading one another and start seeing one another.

I see you.

Not despite the things somebody taught you to hate about yourself.

I am learning to see you with them.

Your face.

Your body.

Your age.

Your history.

Your scars.

Your mobility equipment.

Your language.

Your accent.

Your laugh.

Your silence.

Your questions.

Your magnificent, complicated humanity.

Keep it.

All of it.

You were never required to become somebody else’s definition of beautiful before you became worthy of love.

And perhaps today one of us can find the courage to look into the mirror and tell that old word—

“You tried it.” 🤣

Then hand it its little imaginary clipboard.

Show it the door.

And get on with the holy, hilarious, difficult, beautiful business of being alive.

Because the world does not need another perfectly acceptable human being.

🌎 The world needs YOU.

And Beloved—

#YourLifeMattersToMe.

Asking for A Friend,
Cassandra

#YourLifeMattersToMe

Note: One step. One step. One step. You are loved. You are NOT alone. Keep on being…YOU!

If this found a tender place in you, pull up a chair in the comments. Share it with somebody who spent too many years believing a broken measuring stick. Like it, follow/subscribe, and come back—we are finding keys together every day. 🔑💔🌎🥹