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Just how ugly was that Ugly Duckling?
I want to see a picture. Because if you tell me that it was just because his siblings were all a bright yellow and by some unfortunate horror of fate he was…putty colored! I am going reply: this is still a cute, little creature with downy feathers, and perfect, round, shiny black eyes we are talking about, right?
A quick search for The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen yields various artists’ illustrations of the ousted little avian in grey, black, brown or beige. So how do you actually define his otherness?
And just who signed off on the “ugly”?
Our qualifiers are a matter of perception. If we don’t guard them carefully and live in peace with what Life has granted us, we might be in danger of opening up to someone else’s views. If we don’t hold strong, those views might overshadow our own.
She was only about 4 years old. She came home from San Pablo Park after playtime with her pre-school class, and looked at me with tears brewing. “These girls in the park said I had gray eyes.” “They said, ‘Look at her weird gray eyes!’ They wouldn’t play near me.” I felt her tangible heartbreak rippling onto my mother’s heart. The symbiosis that makes you hurt when she hurts. I thought of her beautiful blue eyes that sometimes echoed back greens, if she was wearing green, or calm blues – depending on her surroundings – and apparently gray on a very typical, fog-covered Berkeley Summer morning. These eyes were magical to me. I knew every spoke and ray of color, from her pupils to their outer rims. I cherished the tiny brown spot that had somehow, in the genetic cocktail that is our humanness, managed to make its residence in the immensity of her blue ocean eyes. I used to joke to her that this little brown homage was her nod at being half Latina.
There are moments when you have to adjust your worldview to understand a situation. These two little girls in the park, she told me, both had brown eyes. Probably surrounded by family with brown eyes, they were scared of the perceived oddity of her light eyes. It was the unintentional cruelty of children. Unintentional but filterlessly rude, as most times children are.
And then sometimes not so unintentional but fully deliberate….
Bullying is just effective evil marketing – a skewed point of view, skillfully designed to squish someone. Bullies deliberately transform any quality, twist it and wring it and serve it back to you with a ladleful of embarrassment. Sometimes I sense that bullies don’t even buy into the angles that they are spinning. Do you really think his calves are too scrawny, or do you secretly wish he had looked at you in Algebra class that sad, forlorn Tuesday afternoon?
And so La Jirafona was born. Somewhere in the discomforts and inadequacies of a grouping of boys in my elementary school in Lima, someone fashioned the taunt. My infraction: I was too tall. How could I so ridiculously dare to tower over others my age? La Jirafona is the word Jirafa, with an added, unfriendly-sounding superlative roughly translating to the big giraffe-like one. I was only 11, 12 years old… those tentative in-between years. Not young enough to pour over my dolls and have the whole outside world dissipate, and not old enough to have a non-excruciatingly-awkward dynamic with boys. At that age, boys and girls in the playground were still floating in polarized groups, but now I felt exposed and even surrounded in the safety of my closest girlfriends, I felt gangly and conspicuous, whereas before I had though all was fine.
My mother was a diminutive Peruvian-Chinese woman, so it was my 6-ft tall Argentine father who had bequeathed me the alleged curse of my over-height. By age 10, as documented in my first passport photo, I was already 1m 62cm. Finally grown, I landed at a generous 1.75 meters….5 feet 9 inches tall.
My subconscious became a dense soup of fears of being too little or too much in any anatomical or intellectual characteristic, with some unattainable, right level or normal that I would exhaustingly aim to discern. And too big would become a struggle. Too tall. Big feet. Big nose. Once in junior high a faceless jerk du jour shouted at me, “Nose-enstein!” I get it….Frankenstein, Nose-enstein. Clever, evil-marketing bully.
And in my Jirafona days, I would look at shoes yearningly. Everything mattered. How high or how low were those heels? I self-sentenced myself to flats when I liked a little heel so much better. I remember dressing in a pretty pink and white checkered dress that went so well with my sister’s white, hand-me-down mary janes. They had a heel, probably only about two inches, but I remember laboring so. Take a deep breath. Put them on because you love them, and show up at that party, just like that. No one will ever know the struggles that we go through when we are made to feel deficient to our core.
I wish I had told my dad. He would have laughed. For one, he was the type that would not give a damn, but also he was deeply proud of my height. Our stature made us unique. In his eyes, it was like Superman having mega powers within this planet’s humble set of parameters…its measly gravity pull.
So some little morning, for comic relief, I have my husband help me measure my reach, barefoot, tippy-toes to fingertips: 7’-6-1/2.”
With that reach, I have ruled the upper cabinet realm since high school when my mom would be so busy cooking and too deep in preparations and choppings and stirrings to usher her little foot ladder. Yes, I was her height assist. Still now, I always feel a sense of duty and honor when someone who is smaller than me asks me to reach the unreachable. It is like a remedial, not-so-flashy version of that superhero skill; this is what I was put on this earth to do!
And in retrospect, the giraffe is one of the most lovable and alien-without-trying-to-be-alien creatures you can find: showy, crazy markings that look like the geometries of a flagstone patio; a short, velvety fur; and those crazy antler/antenna/horn thingies. Those things are so other, that they have their own name, ossicones, an anatomical occurrence shared only with a couple other species. Yes, giraffes are special. I think, and it is tough to choose with the millions out there, that they are my favorite animal on earth. Then, as amazing superhero La Jirafona, I should really like myself.
So Life turned it around for me eventually. It just waited for me to come around, and to stand firmly for who I really am – no external force needed, to accept of reject that which I already know.
Let me reach that high up, perfect, cobalt blue flower base for you – the one you really need.
A happy song selection, just because...
Up, Up And Away - performed by The 5th Dimension, written by Jimmy Webb
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5akEgsZSfhg
And one for comic relief
I Wish - by Skee-Lo
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryDOy3AosBw
I want to see a picture. Because if you tell me that it was just because his siblings were all a bright yellow and by some unfortunate horror of fate he was…putty colored! I am going reply: this is still a cute, little creature with downy feathers, and perfect, round, shiny black eyes we are talking about, right?
A quick search for The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen yields various artists’ illustrations of the ousted little avian in grey, black, brown or beige. So how do you actually define his otherness?
And just who signed off on the “ugly”?
Our qualifiers are a matter of perception. If we don’t guard them carefully and live in peace with what Life has granted us, we might be in danger of opening up to someone else’s views. If we don’t hold strong, those views might overshadow our own.
She was only about 4 years old. She came home from San Pablo Park after playtime with her pre-school class, and looked at me with tears brewing. “These girls in the park said I had gray eyes.” “They said, ‘Look at her weird gray eyes!’ They wouldn’t play near me.” I felt her tangible heartbreak rippling onto my mother’s heart. The symbiosis that makes you hurt when she hurts. I thought of her beautiful blue eyes that sometimes echoed back greens, if she was wearing green, or calm blues – depending on her surroundings – and apparently gray on a very typical, fog-covered Berkeley Summer morning. These eyes were magical to me. I knew every spoke and ray of color, from her pupils to their outer rims. I cherished the tiny brown spot that had somehow, in the genetic cocktail that is our humanness, managed to make its residence in the immensity of her blue ocean eyes. I used to joke to her that this little brown homage was her nod at being half Latina.
There are moments when you have to adjust your worldview to understand a situation. These two little girls in the park, she told me, both had brown eyes. Probably surrounded by family with brown eyes, they were scared of the perceived oddity of her light eyes. It was the unintentional cruelty of children. Unintentional but filterlessly rude, as most times children are.
And then sometimes not so unintentional but fully deliberate….
Bullying is just effective evil marketing – a skewed point of view, skillfully designed to squish someone. Bullies deliberately transform any quality, twist it and wring it and serve it back to you with a ladleful of embarrassment. Sometimes I sense that bullies don’t even buy into the angles that they are spinning. Do you really think his calves are too scrawny, or do you secretly wish he had looked at you in Algebra class that sad, forlorn Tuesday afternoon?
And so La Jirafona was born. Somewhere in the discomforts and inadequacies of a grouping of boys in my elementary school in Lima, someone fashioned the taunt. My infraction: I was too tall. How could I so ridiculously dare to tower over others my age? La Jirafona is the word Jirafa, with an added, unfriendly-sounding superlative roughly translating to the big giraffe-like one. I was only 11, 12 years old… those tentative in-between years. Not young enough to pour over my dolls and have the whole outside world dissipate, and not old enough to have a non-excruciatingly-awkward dynamic with boys. At that age, boys and girls in the playground were still floating in polarized groups, but now I felt exposed and even surrounded in the safety of my closest girlfriends, I felt gangly and conspicuous, whereas before I had though all was fine.
My mother was a diminutive Peruvian-Chinese woman, so it was my 6-ft tall Argentine father who had bequeathed me the alleged curse of my over-height. By age 10, as documented in my first passport photo, I was already 1m 62cm. Finally grown, I landed at a generous 1.75 meters….5 feet 9 inches tall.
My subconscious became a dense soup of fears of being too little or too much in any anatomical or intellectual characteristic, with some unattainable, right level or normal that I would exhaustingly aim to discern. And too big would become a struggle. Too tall. Big feet. Big nose. Once in junior high a faceless jerk du jour shouted at me, “Nose-enstein!” I get it….Frankenstein, Nose-enstein. Clever, evil-marketing bully.
And in my Jirafona days, I would look at shoes yearningly. Everything mattered. How high or how low were those heels? I self-sentenced myself to flats when I liked a little heel so much better. I remember dressing in a pretty pink and white checkered dress that went so well with my sister’s white, hand-me-down mary janes. They had a heel, probably only about two inches, but I remember laboring so. Take a deep breath. Put them on because you love them, and show up at that party, just like that. No one will ever know the struggles that we go through when we are made to feel deficient to our core.
I wish I had told my dad. He would have laughed. For one, he was the type that would not give a damn, but also he was deeply proud of my height. Our stature made us unique. In his eyes, it was like Superman having mega powers within this planet’s humble set of parameters…its measly gravity pull.
So some little morning, for comic relief, I have my husband help me measure my reach, barefoot, tippy-toes to fingertips: 7’-6-1/2.”
With that reach, I have ruled the upper cabinet realm since high school when my mom would be so busy cooking and too deep in preparations and choppings and stirrings to usher her little foot ladder. Yes, I was her height assist. Still now, I always feel a sense of duty and honor when someone who is smaller than me asks me to reach the unreachable. It is like a remedial, not-so-flashy version of that superhero skill; this is what I was put on this earth to do!
And in retrospect, the giraffe is one of the most lovable and alien-without-trying-to-be-alien creatures you can find: showy, crazy markings that look like the geometries of a flagstone patio; a short, velvety fur; and those crazy antler/antenna/horn thingies. Those things are so other, that they have their own name, ossicones, an anatomical occurrence shared only with a couple other species. Yes, giraffes are special. I think, and it is tough to choose with the millions out there, that they are my favorite animal on earth. Then, as amazing superhero La Jirafona, I should really like myself.
So Life turned it around for me eventually. It just waited for me to come around, and to stand firmly for who I really am – no external force needed, to accept of reject that which I already know.
Let me reach that high up, perfect, cobalt blue flower base for you – the one you really need.
A happy song selection, just because...
Up, Up And Away - performed by The 5th Dimension, written by Jimmy Webb
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5akEgsZSfhg
And one for comic relief
I Wish - by Skee-Lo
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryDOy3AosBw