Have you ever felt ugly?
I am not talking about not having a good day, I am talking about a soul deep, haggard ugliness that just takes over your mind?
I am kind of feeling that way now.
 
There is no rhyme or reason to it. Suddenly you just feel like the stuff God puked up when he saw what his creations were doing.
 
It’s a burning dark feeling that drags you down, that steals your light, that makes you feel smaller than the tiniest microbe. And once more, when you feel this ugly, everything around you just makes the ugliness worse.
 
I want to be special. I want to feel special. I want to walk down the street and be stunning like my Mama. She is stunning, you know. 77 years old and looks like she’s in her fifties. Perfect voice, perfect woman, perfect wife and mother who gave birth to this imperfect thing that is now trying to discover why she is.
 
Have you ever felt ugly? I mean ugly to the point when people call you pretty it doesn’t feel like a compliment, it just sounds condescending. I mean ugly to the point when you can’t even look at your face in the mirror. Ugly that makes you feel that every thing you touch will be as tainted and ugly as you are. Have you ever felt ugly?
 
Sometimes the pep talks don’t work. Sometimes its more mental masturbation than a problem finder. Sometimes you just want to hide your face from the world and drown in your own cesspool of ugly.
 
Nothing you’ve done in your past counts because now everything is trivial when compared to the disaster you are making of your life. You efforts are useless because one day someone is going to look beyond the smiles and the laughter and see what an ugly creature you truly are.
 
Have you ever felt this ugly?
 
Sometimes you feel so low that the curb is high above you and out of reach. Sometimes you feel that the sun is shining on everyone except for you and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Sometimes you look down at yourself and see the blackness that makes up the inner you pulsing through your veins… Sometimes… just sometimes, you pray for it all to end.
 
But almost always when you are at your lowest, at your ugliest, at the height of your despair, something happens to normalize you just a bit. Sometimes it’s a voice, or a sound, or just the sight if the sun beaming off of a neighbors house in patterns so delicate and so infinite that you could spend a thousands sunrises examining them and never be able to put its beauty into words.
 
Sometimes the smallest gesture will pull you out of your funk, make the blackness sink back deep within where it can do no more harm for this day.
 
You know that ugliness is a part of you, you understand that it will never go away, it always lurks just below the surface, waiting for a weak point, waiting for an opening to remind you of what you really are… but…
 
But sometimes being ugly is not so bad, because you know that only those who truly see the darkness in themselves and truly appreciate the beauty in the light.
 
Sometimes you know you are ugly and you don’t care.
 
Sometimes that light grabs a hold of you and it never lets you go.
 
Sometimes despite what the media tells you, or what society tells you, or what your own treacherous heart tells you, you mind becomes absorbed by that light.
 
Sometimes the ugly does not win.
 
Have you ever felt ugly? Have you ever felt that soul deep ugliness that makes you cry onyx tears and forces you to hide your face so the blackness doesn’t show?
 
I have. I do. And I hold onto my light with everything else that is inside me, I hold tight to it so that the ugliness doesn’t consume. For how can we appreciate he light if we don’t have the dark and how can we understand the dark if he never experience the light.
 
Have you ever felt ugly? I do. I have. And I will again.
 
It’s the nature of the beast, the nature of being. I am ugly… but I will not let that ugliness win.