When you are told you are not pretty:

Pretty is a six-letter word that can’t encompass your entire being in its arms. You were born to a mother who wore pain like trees wear their rings, as marks of fierce bravery and battle cries. You almost split her insides open coming out, wailing so hard the plaster cracked, but she grinned and bore it like a champion, even though the walls of her womb felt like one giant cigarette burn that no one cared enough to put out.

You are Icarus incarnate, with a body stitched from wings, flying toward the sun every day no matter how low the storm clouds hover. Pretty is not a synonym for learning how to put together a body that fights itself every day with pocket knives, like assembling letters to form words that flame in the mouth. That’s called survival. Pretty is an ugly word. It leaves behind a bitter residue that apologies cannot erase. Pretty is just an excuse for playing darts with a woman’s confidence.

When told you are not pretty, always remember how your body expanded to fit its widening cage, its blooming hips, how the growing pains were less like pain and more like cracking fault lines. How your body turned itself inside out and spilled over and over again. Getting emptied is not pretty. It is dark and wounding and it requires strength enough to move mountains.

On your worst days do not look in the mirror and call yourself pretty. Call yourself trying, call yourself surviving, call yourself learning how to get through a day, a week, a month or year. Call yourself still learning. Pretty is just six letters for lipstick, false eyelashes, combs for hair that never gets tangled, not for women who earn a victory every day just managing to exist.

When told you are not pretty, do not **** in your stomach. Pretty is a discriminatory word, but having a body that knows what it wants and gets what it wants is not a hate crime. It’s a healing hymn.

Don’t forget how trees shake their last leaves in winter like they’re shedding skin from the old year. Shed pretty. Shed it now. Teach yourself to replace it with heart-wrenching, brilliant, clever, artistic, unique, understanding, fighting. Always living.

When told you are not pretty, don’t fall in love with the ground. Get back up. This is not an apocalypse; this is not the end of the world. A six-letter word doesn’t have the power to burn down every building in site or freeze the entire world in epic proportions. Your body is not wreckage or refuse left over from a world on fire. Your body is just fine.

Look in the mirror. Tell yourself, Pretty is not me. Pretty is an ugly concept. I am more.

The terms and conditions of loving the unloveable:

Participate at your own risk. The problem with loving a dream is that it is a two player game and you are the only one with dice to roll. 

1 and 5. They will tell you they love you in black and white, with mottled colour on ivory skin.

3 and 2. They will tell you that you are beautiful and then let you go.

6 and 6. Your face met with the devil’s fist. You will give your love to a loveless being and they will say thank you with a few broken bones and muffled excuses in only an emergency. In case of an emergency please dial 4. Please dial 4, please dial 4. They will smoke cigarettes as your shaking hands reach up for their face and they will tell you to clean up the blood in the kitchen, in the kitchen, “get in the kitchen”.

You roll again.

6 and 6. Your face met with the devil’s fist. Your hands bound and blood running down your wrists. Please dial 4, please dial 4. He will change, of course he will.

Roll Again.

6 and 12. A third dice to make the game and he will hurt you again and again and again.

The unloveable.

They are not made for lovers hearts or lovers eyes or the morning kiss of a weary child. They are made to hurt and they are made to bleed through the look in their eyes and the names they call you, through the destruction of skin on skin and the idea that anything pure in life must be a ******* sin.

Tonight he leaves you with a pile of his favorite CDs;

you dream of loading them onto Noah’s Ark before the flood,

along with his 3 A.M. texts and prescription glasses;

he will talk to you when she is not around,

look directly into your eyes, until your heart cracks

and spills into his palms like a weak egg yolk

ready for the frying pan. Do not wait for his little green Facebook

symbol to light up or you will be up all night.

He will kiss her in front of you, a kiss so deep

it could cut straight to the bone like an interrogator

slowly removing a suspect’s finger with a carving knife.

Shield your eyes and turn away;

pretend you are casually studying the poster on the wall.

You will wonder if her body leaves an outline in his bed

the same way a crime scene is taped off

around the chalked-in edges of the victim,

and still he will call you twenty minutes before midnight

wanting to go out for ice cream

when you end up comparing the best 90’s music

over his kitchen table instead. When he looks at you

across this very same table, stare directly back.

Do not flinch. Do not turn away this time.

Let the tidal wave of his stare wash over you

until it drenches your hair

and he wants to comb out the sadness with his fingers:

let him. Let him.

It will take a while to work through the tangles

but savor this last moment with his fingers

unknotting you like needles, before tomorrow,

when he will go back to her again, bouncing

between the two of you like a yo-yo,

the kind that returns to the owner

then moves on to another when it grows bored.

Pretty is a six-letter word that can’t encompass your entire being in its arms. You were born to a mother who wore pain like trees wear their rings, as marks of fierce bravery and battle cries. You almost split her insides open coming out, wailing so hard the plaster cracked, but she grinned and bore it like a champion, even though the walls of her womb felt like one giant cigarette burn that no one cared enough to put out.

You are Icarus incarnate, with a body stitched from wings, flying toward the sun every day no matter how low the storm clouds hover. Pretty is not a synonym for learning how to put together a body that fights itself every day with pocket knives, like assembling letters to form words that flame in the mouth. That’s called survival. Pretty is an ugly word. It leaves behind a bitter residue that apologies cannot erase. Pretty is just an excuse for playing darts with a woman’s confidence.

When told you are not pretty, always remember how your body expanded to fit its widening cage, its blooming hips, how the growing pains were less like pain and more like cracking fault lines. How your body turned itself inside out and spilled over and over again. Getting emptied is not pretty. It is dark and wounding and it requires strength enough to move mountains.

On your worst days do not look in the mirror and call yourself pretty. Call yourself trying, call yourself surviving, call yourself learning how to get through a day, a week, a month or year. Call yourself still learning. Pretty is just six letters for lipstick, false eyelashes, combs for hair that never gets tangled, not for women who earn a victory every day just managing to exist.

When told you are not pretty, do not **** in your stomach. Pretty is a discriminatory word, but having a body that knows what it wants and gets what it wants is not a hate crime. It’s a healing hymn.

Don’t forget how trees shake their last leaves in winter like they’re shedding skin from the old year. Shed pretty. Shed it now. Teach yourself to replace it with heart-wrenching, brilliant, clever, artistic, unique, understanding, fighting. Always living.

When told you are not pretty, don’t fall in love with the ground. Get back up. This is not an apocalypse; this is not the end of the world. A six-letter word doesn’t have the power to burn down every building in site or freeze the entire world in epic proportions. Your body is not wreckage or refuse left over from a world on fire. Your body is just fine.

Look in the mirror. Tell yourself, Pretty is not me. Pretty is an ugly concept. I am more.

but see, there is strength in being gentle. when you are humble and patient and filled with love, the world gives back to you. i know there are those who would use my kindness as an excuse to be cruel. i know that there are situations where teeth and fists and fire are the only solutions. but so much in this world opens up when you take a moment to ask even the grass what it feels like to be in such a large family. i will take those who walk on me. there are hundreds of others who grow alongside me. there is much to learn from the shy softness that those who are all bitterness will never get to see.