'Your Expectations'

Sticks and stones break my bones but growing up has torn my soul to pieces.

My childhood was no beauty.

No time for Barbie dolls when there were rice grains to be picked

Delicate fingers are to be blessed with elegance, right?

Mine: stretched and wizened, blessed by the ugly duckling.

Western femininity overshadowed by traditional sentiments

that my youthful bliss didn’t have me feeling like less.

But with a few magic beans and a simple plane ticket,

this was all doomed to change

when I left my childhood and boarded that plane.

I thought life would be better just like on tv…

But I just jumped from the frying pan into the fire…

They called me a tomboy; an ugly he-she.

They told me to go back to where I came from.

Instead of a melting pot, all I got were judgements from what the eye could see.

They called me lists of words I dare not repeat but still have the power to press replay in my mind.

Because they were rich, and I was not.

Because she was pretty, and I couldn’t pay the bills of beauty.

A life I no longer wanted because they couldn’t see me for me.

I’m paralysed- Paralysed by the desire to be liked.

I need the dazzling stars in the night sky to give me their power.

The power of beauty.

They never laid a finger on me,

but every syllable I heard them speak, stabbed through my soul, hardening my heart.

Life was brutal. And I mean that in every sense of the word

It was easier to hide in the darkness before puberty took control. I learnt.

I checked myself into the hotel of social rehab

Finding myself ironically wandered drunk on the society

I needed more to be a better me.

I suffocated my suffering in a cotton case grave.

I believed all the lies they told me about who I am.

Or who I was.

So I changed for them.

In came the heavy-caked makeup, the brown hair, clothes so tight that painted my body like a masterpiece.

But I can’t lie…

I loved the attention.

The attention was on me. And this is what I wanted...I thought.

I loved the attention when I thought it was for me…until I realised that it was targeting my sexual parts.

Exposing my body.

They planted a seed of hope penetrating my bloodstream.

The shattered hope of being liked and beautiful.

I didn’t seem to care.

My heart allowed it, but my gut said no.

No eye has seen and no ear has heard just how much my heart beats

for how much I care about what they think of me.

I breathed an all out-raged war on me by me battles versus them or the next thing they see as “beauty”.

I shackled in the safest place possible on the island of cowardice.

At the corner of complacency and fitting in,

I pray they won’t notice this insecurity I call a life.

Sometimes I still roam the battlefield at night

dressed in my armour of short skirts and tight crop tops.

I look at other girls as they roam the battlefield in tank tops

Believing they have tanked, sinking at the bottom of the ocean, as I am on top of the world.

But you become a sad and lonely self when all you are is the tip of the iceberg.

I find myself drowning in trivial comparisons until I surrender my armour to become content.

To become one with them.

Yet, for a woman, it’s a universal struggle to achieve beauty.

But I could care less…

When I say I could care less about what people think of me

I could.

I could care much less but I care a whole lot

But they are not my source.

Their “beauty” should not be the catalyst in shaping my identity

The word “beauty”,

It has no true meaning, but a distraction to trick us in believing nothing more than words like “pretty”.

Reducing us to judgements that are shallow and petty.

Turning my friends and I from royalty to peasantry.

Fighting for the crown that we already have and own

If someone tells me I’m beautiful, I will take it with a grain of sadness—

There is someone somewhere out there that is viewed as something less.

The sad thing is I’ve got used to assuming it’s me that is beautiful

But it’s my conformity to the norms of femininity.

I still try to act that makeup that has transported me to mental elevation

Yet I still subject myself to self-degradation because even with these rose-tinted glasses I have on,

All I can see are my conspicuous imperfections.

I understood that beauty is not within the eye of the beholder-

nor is it even skin deep to your bones.

It is a fluid social construct that beguiles us, manipulates us.

It keeps us weak, hidden from our strengths, of our individuality and true beauty.

They made sure of this.

Even though there is still a trace of the pain they have caused

Those bruises are as hard as armour and as faint that sometimes I can’t see anymore

The stones you used to bruise me have rolled away.

Your beauty and society is your weapon.

My beauty is my power.

If I had to choose between what society considered beautiful and just fighting the battle to be what you want and not what I want,

I don’t think I would like to remain myself.

Because I am the girl with dry humour,

And your plucked eyebrows now means nothing to me.