The first time I felt undesirable was when, in my school years, I was subjected to relentless and cruel bullying by the other kids.
You see, I had always been considered relatively unattractive and “hard to look at,” even by my own parents, and even by the people I considered to be my friends. I like to think that God, when He was designing me, made a few errors in the process out of pure spite, as I was covered in such sin that even He winced in disgust as he cast me out into this miserable existence. I had not taken notice of this fact until it began to seep into my daily life, and affect every part of my studies. Initially, it had been simple teasing; jokes and quips made about my appearance and structure, that usually came from behind closed doors and in whispers that were barely audible. It wasn’t until — as a result of an innocent question posed by one of my peers — I began to hate myself and who I had been born as.
“What woman would be so demented as to date someone as ugly as him?”
Looking back on it now, it had been one of the most truthful things uttered about me. A recessed chin, cold black eyes that did not radiate any sort of life, skin that had been mismanaged and chaffed to such a degree that it began to turn to ash, coupled with my short and fat stature at a measly 5 feet and 2 inches, made it quite obvious that I had rolled the genetic dice and come up short. The only thing I had was my intelligence, and even then, it paled in comparison to those around me, who seemed to simply breeze by in their studies without any struggle, especially in the sciences, which even now still torment me with the memories of equations and derivations.
From then on, however, the teasing began to escalate. Shunning, wherein I would be left to sit alone and eat lunch by myself. Neglect, by the other students who would not include me in their activities, and the teachers who couldn’t bear to look at me. Eventually, some of the bigger kids felt brazen enough to try and physically intimidate me into giving them money, or performing some sort of favor for them. I tried to fight back — one time to the point where I had been bloodied and bruised. The teachers did nothing to help, and so I carried the resentment I held towards my oppressors that day with me, as I had been forced into helping them, lest I put my life at stake.
As you know, these events, coupled with the insanity of having to survive in the system that neglected me by being in favor of results and accolades, forced me into a position where I wanted nothing more than to die. To fade away and pray to God — or rather, the being who cursed me with this Fate, to reconsider and put me back into this world as someone even slightly more amusing to look at. It had been one of the most brutal things to endure for someone so young, but I did manage to find one way to cope with it: pain. Lots of it self-inflicted, as a result of my words provoking those who hated me.
Eventually, I found myself falling into the same mindset that would plague the rest of my adolescence: a Machiavellian outlook on the world that had been rooted in Darwinistic thinking, combined with an ingrained sense of egoism that uprooted any morality left in me. “Why should I be kind to others when they hate me? Why should I not live for myself and aspire to be that which is so hated that my very presence is enough to earn the scorn of the collective society I reside in?” Those were my guiding questions, and eventually, I began to stop caring about trying to appease people, and rather, try to eke out my personal vision of my life, earned with money and power that would allow me to crush those that once laughed at me, and deliver to them a sick blow to whatever warped sense of superiority they had.
The plan I had, worked like this: using whatever money I earned from working and scrimping the meager allowance I received from my family, I would invest in ventures that would yield me more profit than I could ever dream of. The same people that would never want to be seen around me would salivate at the sight of my prosperity — the women who, otherwise, would never give me the time of day would be like putty in my hands, and mold to whatever desire I wanted, and I would finally be able to attain the normal life I believed I was entitled to. If God cursed me with such a fate, I would use the only mistake He made to curse him right back and live as a rejection of his supposed brilliancy. To put the matter succinctly, I had become a machine, and the oil I consumed in order to run were the thoughts and comments of those around me.
Photo by Zach Guinta on Unsplash
