I watched as he slicked back her silk-like hair into a french braid, almost like he was weaving himself through the strands, connecting himself to her. I watched with innocent eyes, young eyes, tired eyes, confused eyes, I was only five. At five years old I was able to recognize where I stood on the scale of human worth and I was able to acknowledge the fact that for some unknown reason I, along with me and my two other sisters, were placed below her. She was so high up above me that I couldn’t even look at her. She was pretty. I, however, was not, and I accepted that about myself for years upon years as I lathered cosmetics onto my bruised flesh, hoping the more I applied, the greater the chance was that you might look at me with the same amount of life in your eyes as when you're looking at her. I was set on a seventeen year long self-destructive journey to try to win your love. I was taught that love had to be won, that no matter how much it stung you had to keep that clean and pristine smile on your less than average face, because you weren't to let them know you were hurting.
I wondered if there were others like myself, enduring a relentless identity crisis, trying personalities on like wardrobes. I wondered if it were possible for the pain to be diminished, if it were possible to learn how to breathe again, so I began writing. I wrote my feelings down on paper and somehow they ended up on a poetry website, encountering view after view, like upon like, accumulating feedback from others who shared the same pain I felt.
"You're beautiful," they wrote.
At the time, I didn't understand what they meant by this. No photos of me were posted, how can you measure beauty through words?  I learned that being beautiful meant having minimal flaws, dropping jaws, turning heads. Being beautiful meant being loved, being beautiful meant mattering. I didn't understand, so I started singing.
I sang and let my words exert themselves through melodies, through D-minors and half-broken music notes, I sang, I sang, I sang, and oh God, I couldn't stop.
"You're beautiful," they shouted to me while I was on stage, performing with a fleeting heart that was ready to burst out of my chest and run away, but this time, something was different, I understood.
I knew that she meant I am beautiful in the way that I am, the way that I spill my emotions through my songs like an everlasting ocean, and I knew that she meant I am beautiful in the way that my mind is in a constant state of perplexity.
I looked at her and I saw her face, her pretty face, her face that I longed to have. She had a perfect nose, perfect eyes, perfect lips, perfect complexion, perfect hips. I believed all these things were the key to love, and eternal happiness, I believed they were the ingredients to making me beautiful, but now,
I'd rather have a bent nose, boney hips, bad skin and bad lips, and have someone tell me I'm beautiful, because I knew it meant I was beautiful in the way I loved, laughed, wrote, sang,
Than to have no physical flaws and ignorantly believe that being beautiful in the way that I look, is enough.
So I will keep being beautiful, and not to feed the myth that some day you will love me for me, but because I have finally found what I was made to do, and who I was made to do it for.
I am a girl, inside a song, inside a poem, and I am my own.