9:03pm September 29, 2014

Troll. Ugly Girl.

That’s what they called me in college.

Karl’s troll.

They didn’t mean Internet troll.

They meant I was an ugly girl that Karl must be dating because I gave good head or something.

Ugly girl.

Ugly girl because my eyebrows met in the middle.

Ugly girl because I couldn’t maintain even barely passable hygiene, except (quite rarely) when Karl would force me to shower. And I didn’t really know how to shower properly, so it didn’t help much. (I would spend years in “ADL training” and still not learn how to bathe myself properly. I can bathe other people just fine.)

Ugly girl because I couldn’t keep my hair brushed, so it was one big tangled knot.

Ugly girl because I had visible facial and body hair.

Ugly girl because I couldn’t brush my teeth often.

Ugly girl because my nose stuck up too high like a pig or a power outlet, people’s two favorite comparisons.

Ugly girl because I had an unusual gait.

Ugly girl because my hands did fluttery flappy things they weren’t supposed to do.

Ugly girl because I waved things in front of my face as if nobody could see me doing it.

Ugly girl because my nose was covered in blackheads. I still remember the first time someone looked at those as an amazing curiosity rather than a sign of utter disgustingness, and how wonderful that made me feel.

Ugly girl.

Ugly. Girl.

Because a troll is an ugly girl. There’s a version of troll that refers to guys, but it has very different connotations. There’s no genderless form of troll, and nobody back then saw me as genderless anyway.

So troll meant ugly girl.

And troll got under my skin.

And I threw all my troll dolls out the window into the snow. I never saw them again.

But I never got rid of being the troll.

I never got rid of the sense that I belonged to Karl. That the only reason anyone tolerated my presence at all was out of deference to Karl, and not because I had all these wonderfully close friends in college. (I did not. I had two, maybe 2.5, and one of them refuses to bring their name into all this for fear of being targeted by the bullies the way they were targeted in the past. Everyone else tolerated my presence because they were Karl’s friends and I was Karl’s significant other.)

I only got rid of belonging to Karl by dumping him. And then someone else wanted me to belong to him. He liked having women, and FAAB people, belong to him. I narrowly avoided actually belonging to him but he still pretends that a single photograph means I belonged to him. He does that to a lot of women/FAAB people. HIs friend(!) described him as “a pathological liar who’s obsessed with women”, in a “What can you do about a person like that ~shrug~?” sort of way. As if that explained, justified, somehow made okay, or made more okay, the stalking, the harassment, the defamation, the manipulation of people who might otherwise be my friends.

But back to troll.

I am an Ugly Girl.

Or at least, an Ugly Person.

And that’s finally okay.

I can finally claim my place as a Troll without shame.

Because sometimes ugly is perfect. And sometimes ugly is beautiful. And sometimes ugly is exactly what you needed.

I know there are people who find it hard to see me as ugly, but believe me a lot of the world sees the combination of breasts and facial hair as ugly no matter what presumed gender it appears on. And unibrows are almost a symbol of ugliness in modern media culture. Want to make a woman ugly? Put some fake hair between her eyebrows.

But I love my unibrow, I love my facial hair, I love my double chin, I love my small receded chin, I love my big eyes and my “pig nose”, I love my mouth that hangs open and won’t close without a fight, I love that my lips hang down at the sides. And I’m not kidding or exaggerating. I turned a corner sometime this past year and the unthinkable became thinkable: No matter the cause, no matter the consequences, what others have called ugly is now beautiful to me. In myself and in others.

I love looking at people who are fat. Who have unusual facial structures, or just facial structures that aren’t in line with white Western beauty norms. Who move too much, or too little, or in ways that are highly unusual. Because among other things, as a faceblind person, these are the people I can recognize. Everyone else looks sort of like ghosts, but an unusual-looking person is memorable and stands out and is beautiful to me. Unfortunately to most people unusual means ugly.

And I can finally apply it to me. I can see myself in the mirror and see an unusual-looking fat person and go “That person is beautiful no matter what anyone thinks.” (Karl used to tell me “I don’t care what anyone says, you’re radiantly beautiful” and I used to wonder what “anyone” said, but could never work it out.

I believe it was Natalia who gave me a Princess Fiona figurine. It’s perfect. She’s perfect. She’s green and ugly-beautiful and doesn’t take shit from anyone. I want to be like her.

But for now I can be Troll and I can be Ugly Girl and I can be a better Troll and a better Ugly Girl (even a genderless Ugly Girl) than anyone wanted me to be when they were habitually calling me those things.

And now I can say I love that I stand out in color against the people in black and white faded images that I can’t hold in my head and remember at all. Not that it’s their fault that my brain won’t remember them. This isn’t a value judgement, or universal. I’m just happy to be one of the ones I can see.

What’s next, the Troll Manifesto, I don’t know, but I like the sound of it.

And Karl did not stick around me for my (nonexistent) sexual prowess, either, much as that would’ve explained things to people shallow enough to think all relationships are based on conventional attractiveness.

There is something important in claiming my ugliness and saying I don’t have to be beautiful.

There is something important in claiming my beauty and saying ugliness is beautiful.

Both of them are important, so I choose to do both, not one or the other, nor act like one excludes the other.

TL;DR:. Bullies called me a troll because it meant ugly girl, not Internet troll, back then. I have since come to embrace my ugliness and the beauty within it as inseparable and amazing things.