Ugly Duckling

1|my ugly duckling roots

"Ugly duckling!!"

"There she goes again, why can't she stay home and stop hurting our eyes? Ugh her face just ruined my morning"

These are rare few examples of what people would say when they took a look at my face. Everyone couldn't bear to even look me in the eye for they were so scared of getting nightmares at night. Even my parents, who were the ones that gave birth to me, didn't bother about me after they saw my face. Hi I'm Katherine Black, a girl with a disfigured face since I was a child and nobody ever gave me a glance since then.

I was often neglected by my parents who deemed me as a "failure" in terms of looks because I wasn't like my other siblings. Pretty, handsome, cute and any other descriptive word you can think of. You name it, they have it. That's how charismatic my siblings were. I had three older siblings, Marcus, Veronica and Patricia.

I was the youngest and probably should never have been born. To everyone around me, they were embarrassed to be seen with me and soon I stopped going out altogether except I still went to school because my parents didn't want me to taint their name further with a lack of education.

I wasn't always like this. I remember that I had an accident when I was six, when my parents went out with my two siblings and left me at home alone with my older sister Veronica. She was a teenager at that time, fifteen going on to sixteen. She was trying to cook us both lunch and was trying to boil the water to cook noodles. She didn't know her way around cooking too well and poured oil accidentally into the fire. I walked into the kitchen and in a frenzy to put out the fire, she tripped me and I fell face first into the fire.

My reflexes weren't quick enough so when I finally got my brain working and stood up away from the fire, half my face was burnt and numb. I couldn't feel anything on the left side of my face and instantly Veronica called an ambulance.

After all this drama, my parents were contacted, they rushed down to the hospital to see me but it was too late. I was already disfigured. Now my family can't bare to look at me whether out of guilt or having nightmares, I couldn't tell anymore.

Soon after the incident, I went to school with everything still normal to me but I couldn't for the life of me comprehend why my friends in school would shun me when they saw me in school. I wanted to confront them about why they were avoiding me, was I that bad of a friend to be thrown away just like that? But when I approached them from the back, I heard them saying things about me which I wished I never heard because I could never look at them in the same way ever again.

"What happened to Kat's face? She looks so ugly now I don't even want to be friends with her anymore"

"I'm worst than you I can't even bare to look at her face"

After I heard these from the group of them, I just turned and left and never looked back. I stopped pestering them for answers as to why we stopped being friends. I already knew the reason why. Despite them being ignorant six year olds like me at that point in time, I couldn't help but take their words to heart and till this very day still remember what they said word for word.

It was what they said that gave me a wake up call. To stop trying to exist altogether because I was a sore thumb. I just didn't fit anywhere. Not with my them. Not with my family. Not with my relatives. I ceased to exist. I was a taboo in my family. Whenever my name came up in a conversation, everyone would keep silent and start talking about something else.

Over time I was forgotten. I was that something that was constantly on replay in their mind since the accident happened, but slowly edged my way out of their memories because they simply did not want to remember. How I looked. How I was as a person. They just ctrl, alt, deleted me like I never existed. I was soon left on the streets because everyone forgot about me. Whether I was alive or dead was completely irrelevant to them. So I left. I went to an orphanage and never left since.

I was seven then and now I'm seventeen, moving on to eighteen. I tried looking at my family secretly since I went to a different school completely but I would see them on my social media and see what wonderful lives they led. They looked so happy and I was glad, that for once I could do something for them. I could remove the labels everyone else gave them for having me as a child, as a sister, as a defect in their perfect lives.
At times, I would pity myself for not having anyone to rely on, but when I think about the burden I once was to my family for a year, a whole entire year, I would be contented with my decision.

I know what you are thinking, how can she have stayed with her family for a year before leaving? The truth is I got disfigured on my birthday and a year after that incident, I accepted the fact that I was ugly and shouldn't pull my family down with me. I plucked myself up and left, starting a new life for me at the orphanage.

I was depressed for a short period of time as a kid but I soon reverted to being happy. Happy that I could do something for my family and finally be of use. Happy that despite my looks dragging my family down, I didn't have to deal with it any longer. It's with that mindset that I left and never looked back at my old life again. I'm not sure what I would have done if I continued to stay in that toxic environment where everyone looked like they stepped out of a magazine cover in their everyday life and I was plain olé ugly me. I would have probably committed suicide a long time ago if not for the fact I was simply too scared of dying. Till this day I live to tell my tale when I was labelled as an "ugly duckling".