Pretty Girl

By Erin Deborah Waks

I think the things we don’t hear growing up end up affecting us almost as much, if not more, than the things we do.

As if prompting me to become almost infallibly, and often detrimentally, independent, I was always given detailed and constant praise about my intelligence, work ethic, drive and talent. Talent for writing, shock horror, but also for a whole host of other things at school. I say this not to brag, but to elucidate the origins of how I am. I was always a clever girl. To be honest, at school, most of the time I was labelled the cleverest girl.

But I was never called a pretty one. Never a beautiful one, a sexy one. Never a cool girl, always slightly on the outside of friendship groups (not that my soul mate of a best friend and I ever minded), much more content with my own company. Never any of those things that make a girl so overtly attractive to others.

‘Erin,’ a friend pondered recently. ‘When we were younger, we were never part of that group, “girls with boyfriends.” But as adults, that just doesn’t matter any more.’ It’s true, at school, there was a distinct camp of girls who seemed to flit seamlessly from man to man, racking up a slew of ex-boyfriends they’d brag about in the canteen. And then there was the group who seemed to have their attention elsewhere. 

I always thought it’s because I wasn’t pretty enough. That morphed slowly into ‘not thin enough’, which quickly became my adolescent mantra. I now know where that can lead. And then I was given all sorts of other explanations for my singleness: too picky, not picky enough, and so on. Sometimes, I think it would have been easier if men had made me feel beautiful my whole life. Truthfully, I’m grateful I had to do it all myself - even if, every now and then, I’d like to let someone else carry that weight.

The truth is what stopped me from having that oh-so-desirable string of boyfriends in my youth wasn’t that I wasn’t pretty enough, thin enough, smart enough. It’s that I believed I wasn’t.

It’s only now, as an adult, that I recognise I was never not a pretty girl. When I look back fondly on old photos, I don’t see the same thing I saw in the mirror five, even ten, years ago. 

Now, I see a tiny brunette with untamable curly hair, a teenager with just enough strength and complexity to be a halfway decent writer, a slightly curvy and yet undoubtedly beautiful one with her own messy feelings. 

I see a girl who carries herself with the grace of someone who had to teach herself she could, and walks with the confidence of someone whose self-worth rests on building blocks she slowly but surely constructed all on her own. 

I see a pretty girl, as well as a clever one, a slightly unsure-of-herself one, and everything else in between. 

To be honest, I just see me.