- To Be Seen & Safe
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- I'm simply an ogre, part one
Hi beautiful, awesome peeps!
Have you ever looked in the mirror and seen an ogre? I have, for most of my life.
I wrote this essay around two years ago and it was an especially hard one to write. When I decided to circle back to it recently, I felt nausea in my stomach re-reading the draft. I imagine it may be a hard one to read, but this story is about beauty standards, about trauma and abuse from society, culture, and family, and it is also about one’s inner voice and inner resolve— the ability to stick to your own damn guns.
Whether you are Korean or not, I do believe there is something you’ll be able to relate to, and I hope that it may even ignite an excavation of your own conditioning around your physical beauty.
This piece will be split into two emails, as it’s the longest one I’ve written thus far. Please feel free to reply to this email to share your thoughts (I love hearing from you) and forward it to anyone who you think might enjoy it.
As always, thank you for receiving a huge piece of my heart,
Amy
Word count: 8,123
Pages: 14
I’m Simply an Ogre by Amy Lee
Free excerpt below:
Age 14
My family and I visit Korea every year for my summer vacation. We’re on our fifth or sixth trip here. It’s during our trips that I understand very clearly I am not apart of the beauty standard. Pale faces, v-shaped jawlines, and double eyelids, (or rather procedures and surgeries to have these features,) are plastered all over billboards and bus ads in Seoul. Plastic surgery is advertised like a McDonald’s Happy Meal is in the States. Everyone, in these images, looks the same to me, like dolls or figurines with the same lifeless expression— and that confuses me.
On this particular trip, my mom and I find ourselves in the cosmetics store, sweating off the humidity of a brutal Korean summer. We are here, my mother says, on the hunt for double eyelid tape and glue, since I have denied time and time again being gifted plastic surgery for my 8th grade promotion.
“You know, Amy, I used to have monolids too,” she retells for the millionth time, “but I just wore this tape everyday and it worked. Now I have double eyelids. Let’s find it.” We find the section and she practically wipes out the whole shelf, shoving five boxes and one tube of glue in my arms. When we go back home to the States, I put on the sticky thin tape on my eyelids before I sleep every night, as she recommends, for about a week. It’s uncomfortable and itchy and I hate it. I don't want to do this. I don’t even make it through one whole box before giving up.
The rest of the boxes just sit in my drawer, collecting dust, for years, and sit as a guilty reminder of how lazy I am at being beautiful.
How I settle for being ugly.
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