The advantages of being not-so-beautiful (or How to console yourself every time you look in the mirror)

Before anything else, let’s establish the fact that I am not beautiful. Or pretty. Or striking. The closest I came was cute, which as we all know is Lord-help-me-you-are-ugly-but-I-don’t-want-to-hurt–your-feelings. I have never scored big in the looks department. When I was a young girl a neighbour commented that unlike my siblings I was “beautiful in a different way”. The fact that she was a husband beating loudmouth didn’t make it any better; I was still differently beautiful. And my siblings aren’t too beautiful/handsome either. My sister and I still laugh over my high school photos, especially the one I took in the NCC uniform. And people keep telling me I look older than I actually am (horrors!), and once when I was twenty-four years old a guy I knew said I looked twenty-six. But there is a silver lining - a few weeks ago a guy friend said I looked younger than I actually am (I asked him how old do I look and he said twenty six. Does that mean I will be stuck at that age forever? I wouldn’t mind it much.)

Ok enough about my looks, let’s talk about yours. How many of you are truly satisfied with the way you look? None of you, I bet. How many of you look at celebrity photos wishing you could look like them? I’d put my money on “All of you”.

Actually, I don’t want to talk about your looks either. Do whatever you like with it, keep it as it is, reinvent it, smear layers of makeup on your face, wear a mask, I don’t care. Let’s get to the point, shall we? A few reasons why we should be glad we were not born beautiful:

1. People are not intimidated by your looks, making you approachable and likeable.

2. When someone of the opposite sex likes you, you know it’s not because of your stunning beauty but because of something good in you (hooray, you have some good likeable quality).

3. There is more room for improvement. Makeovers, plastic surgery, botox, the possibilities are endless.

4. It’s a lesson in patience. How? Remember all those minutes and hours you spend applying makeup but it never quite came out as it did on the faces of the models in the magazines and you then remove it all and re-apply? If that isn’t patience, then what is?

5. It’s a great learning experience. How? You cannot win favours because of your "exceptional beauty", so you have to work harder to get what you want, which in the end always works out good for you and you learn something in the process.

6. No matter how dumb you are, you will never be called “beauty without brains”, which I feel is more of an insult than being called plain stupid.

7. Continuing with the above point, people don’t automatically categorise you as “dumb” because you are good looking. Something is expected out of you, something good, which again is a learning experience.

8. In case you decide to become a psychopath or serial killer you can always have the excuse that you felt like an outcast because of your unusually bad looks and that the seed of insecurity and inferiority was sowed in you as a result of all the taunts and mocking from your peers the fruit of which was your hatred for people in general and good looking people in particular, thus the killings.

9. You have more things to do to kill time. Squeezing pimples, scrubbing, removing unwanted hair, removing warts, fighting an ingrown toenail, looking up different techniques in skin care, fighting halitosis, etc etc. Boredom becomes an alien concept.

10. You are rendering a great service to humanity just by being ugly. If there were no ugly people, the beautiful people would not be beautiful at all; they would just be normal boring people. So always keep in mind that it’s because of people like you and me that the beautiful people are, well, beautiful. It’s all relative, my friend.

So, what next? Walk up to your parents and/or any living ancestor you can find and thank them for their imperfect genes.