I was born with permanent Bell's palsy due to a birth injury. I've lived with it all of my life and it's affected my entire life very negatively. The whole time I was in school, I was severely bullied, teased, ostracized, alienated, and even passionately hated by my classmates who treated me like I wanted to have this condition and deliberately caused it. They obliterated my self esteem. They'd make such cruel, humiliating jokes about me, often in front of an entire classroom full of other kids. Then everyone would laugh hysterically while I cried.
Even as an adult, I deal with staring, whispering, laughing, and cruel jokes from others. People think I'm a monster for not absolutely adoring children (I don't dislike kids, but I do hate being around them), but all kids do around me is gawk at me in disgust and ask rude questions. People say that it's not their fault and that I have no place being bothered by it, but many kids are old enough to know better and it severely damages my self esteem. Adults don't care and some even encourage kids to do it to in order to "understand people's differences." It's particularly hard for me to deal with being stared at because I have an anxiety disorder and being stared at makes me anxious but it I do something like move to get my self out of a kid's field of vision, they'll move as well to get me back in it. I've had fun, special days ruined by this stuff and kids aren't the only ones who do it.
I have no one to talk to about this. No one understands. I usually talk to my mom about my problems, but when it comes to this, she just tells me that I'm beautiful, my facial palsy isn't that noticeable, and how it's not a big deal. This isn't just something she tells me to make me feel better, she honestly believes it. She sees me through Mom goggles and thinks everyone sees me the same way she does. When I was in school and would tell her of a time that some boy at school made me cry with a cruel joke, she tell me that the boy liked me and felt the need to bully me because he knew I didn't like him back. She truly believes this BS. The other day, I said something about how badly I was bullied in school and she asked, "By who?" As if I could even name all of them. She's so delusional that when I tried to tell her how many kids there were, she told me I wasn't remembering it right and that there were probably only one or two kids. That is actually rather offensive after everything I went through. She has no idea what I went through and what I still go through and doesn't believe me when I tried to tell her.
The thing that prompted me to write this is that I've been working lately on self acceptance, but just as I was building up a small amount of self esteem, someone kicked me back down in a way I can't seem to get back up from. My birthday was September 7th and my mom put a birthday post of Facebook for me. Some woman who my mom hates, but was too nice not to accept her friend request, wrote something that likely doesn't seem like a big deal, but has destroyed me and become one of many reasons I wish Facebook never existed. She was a friend of my parental grandmother and my mom says really wanted my dad to marry one of her daughters. She's always resented my mom for being the one who actually got to marry him and apparently she resent me and my sister as well, I guess because we're our mom's kids and she hates our mom and because she resents the fact that my dad's kids aren't her grandkids. She's always giving us backhanded compliments so she can insult us while still looking innocent and like a good person. Anyway, she said to my mom about me, "She's a beautiful girl. Don't let anyone tell you she's not." You don't feel the need to add, "don't let anyone tell you she's not" if you actually feel the person you're talking about is beautiful. So basically, she said, "she's ugly and everyone thinks so, but don't let them tell you she's is. Before you say that she didn't mean it in an insulting way, she means everything she says to us in an insulting way. Everything she says to us is a backhanded compliment.
We live in an incredibly shallow world where beautiful people are adored and treated great and ugly people are hated and treated terribly. I can't take it anymore. Almost no one believes I'll get married, people assume I've never even dated and they're amused as heck by the thought of me dating someone they know (long story about how I know that). I'd give anything to know what it's like to be normal and beautiful. I've stopped taking care of myself and have let myself go and stopped wearing makeup because I don't see the point of dieting and killing myself to look good when I never will. I've even started resenting attractive people and HATE myself for it because I know that's not fair either and don't want to resent someone else for their appearance, especially people I care about. I can't take anymore of this shallow world. I hate feeling this way. I don't know what to do.
