The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick.
The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears.
I'm Steve Alman.
I'm Cheryl Strait.
This is Dear Sugar's.
Oh dear song, won't you please?
She has some little sweet days with me.
I check my bell by every day.
Oh, and this sugar, using my way.
So, Cheryl, I want to read you something.
Okay.
I've been thinking about it.
This singularity of meaning, I was my face, I was ugliness, when asked what was wrong with my life.
Everything led to it, everything receded from it, my face as personal vanishing point.
When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone.
Without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like?
Lucy Greeley.
That is the great Lucy Greeley from her remarkable memoir, Autobiography of a face.
And the reason it just leapt out at me is because we've had a number of letters show up in our inbox.
A couple in particular that we're going to talk about today that really are about something utterly elemental, which is,
I feel inside my face is ugly.
It's unbearable to me.
I'm ashamed for feeling this way, but I cannot read myself of that feeling.
And I think Lucy Greeley among the many other things she writes about in that memoir is this conflation of somebody's entire identity within their face.
And how their face is perceived by the world and more importantly by themselves.
Right. And we're going to really focus in on the kind of of face that Lucy Greeley really had in life.
She died several years ago, but not before she wrote this beautiful memoir and other essays and books about, you know, really her experience as a kid who had cancer in childhood.
And she had to have several surgeries to her face that really disfigured her.
And indeed the ugliness she speaks of was not imagined.
It wasn't the garden variety.
I wish I had, you know, brown eyes instead of green or whatnot.
It was really, she did have a face that was at odds with our conventional ideas of beauty or even, you know, averageness.
I've written actually about a friend of mine. I wrote about him in one of my sugar columns called Beauty and the Beast.
He had been severely burned when he was in his 20s.
And he did say, I look like a monster. I am ugly. Nobody will love me. How do I find love?
And what I think was the most useful to him in our conversations was not me saying to him, no, no, no, no, you're not ugly.
Because the fact is he did look different.
And to really just be able to sit with that and talk about that was in so many ways honoring his actual experience rather than trying to pretend it didn't exist.
And that's what I want to do today. I really want to bear witness to the truth that not everybody comes even close to that kind of conventional idea of beauty.
I'll read the first letter.
Do it.
Dear sugars, I'm ugly. Not on the inside. On the inside, I'd like to think I'm a supermodel of the guts, brains, and heart variety.
But on the outside, I have what they call a face for radio.
I'm ashamed to be writing you with such a simple problem when there is real suffering in the world.
But sugars, I've been waiting all my life to stop caring about my looks or for this to hurt less.
I thought I would grow out of it. I'm now in my early 30s and I'm still tormented by the idea of how different my life might be if I'd been dealt better numbers and the genetic lottery.
I know there's no guarantee that beauty would change anything, but it sure feels like it would.
I'm still hung up on and pained by the unfairness of it, even though much more unfair and painful things happen to people all the time.
Very little has worked to dull the pain of walking around with an ugly face. If you couldn't guess, I'm a woman by the way.
I do all the usual grooming things to compensate, but I was born with facial features far from society's ideal. That conventional beauty standards are of subjective and destructive doesn't help with the fact that most people think I look like a bridge troll.
I don't have body dysmorphia. I'm just at the bottom end of that particular bell curve.
While my ideals tell me that shouldn't matter, I've always felt that my unfortunate face makes my life worth less in others eyes.
Do you remember the study that found parents were less likely to buckle in unattractive children and grocery carts? That hit me hard.
I don't hate myself. I think I'm smart and witty. I have accomplishments I'm proud of. I work hard to be kind to others.
But I'm ugly. I adore my wonderful friends and feel in live and by my work as an artist. But I'm ugly.
I'm amped about the natural world I move through, the books I read, the incredible people I meet. But I'm ugly.
I've experienced more significant adversity than this in my life, including growing up in poverty and the early violent death of my father.
But this has not automatically allowed me to put my ugly girl sadness into perspective and get over it.
None of the usual platitudes, true though they may be, helped me much. I'm completely invisible to men. They look right past me.
Recently I went on a trip with friends and one of our party who'd been snapping pictures the whole time shared them with the group a week later.
I realized that out of about 20 shots, I wasn't in a single photo. I'd been there the whole time. He just cropped me out of the frame without even noticing he was doing it.
Plata to the second looks fade. I accept the consequences of aging, but couldn't I please experience what it's like to be pretty first even for a little while?
Plata to the third. Everyone feels insecure about their looks. I know this is true, but frankly, I have more cause to than most.
Sometimes my dog face problem is thrown into particularly sharp relief, such as when I see myself next to my mother, former homecoming queen, and younger sister, recently compared in my presence to Kate Winslet.
Or when a well-meaning friend after a few drinks let slip that he could understand why I quit acting, which I used to love, because girls who look like me have limited prospects.
I don't think either he or my friend who took all the photos meant to be cruel, but I was guided.
And then of course there's this. No man I've dated has ever called me beautiful, ever.
They might say I'm cute or sexy or they say they love me, but they never say I'm beautiful, and I don't think they ever will.
I feel such despair at the idea that I'll live my whole life and no one will ever call me beautiful.
I know I'm wasting my energy dwelling on something I can't change, and I'd like to be better than the superficial self-obsessed, self-pity and jerk I feel like I am writing this letter.
God how I wish I could just get over myself and be the self-assured fire-breathing feminist smarty pants I want to be.
But how? How do I do it? How do I accept the face, fate, doubt me, and move on with my life?
Signed hideously, unhappy.
This was a tough letter. I want to read a little bit more Lucy Greeley, because I think one of the things that we're going to see in all these letters that come into our inbox is, this is not something that I really should be worrying about.
There's self-loathing that sort of precedes even the possibility of thinking about it.
And Lucy Greeley just lasers right in on this, she writes, I treated despair in terms of hierarchy. If there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated.
I thought I simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong.
That's part of the problem. It's a form of despair and longing and doubt and negativity that you can't acknowledge without feeling that you're betraying your feminist smarty pants self or somehow being solipsistic and self-absorbed.
What I would point out to you hideously unhappy is that there are a couple of things that are worth thinking about. The first is that you had a really tough and unhappy childhood. It sounds like with poverty and then the early and violent death of your father and then compounding that.
And this is something I can relate to in my own small way. You had a mom who was objectively, it sounds like judged by the world to be beautiful and a sister who also is, you know, compared to Kate Winslet.
And as somebody who has two brothers who were always like just recognized as extremely attractive, that does really shape how you think of yourself.
And that's your measuring stick. And I just, it's worth asking the questions to what extent to those experiences magnify the feeling you have of I am never going to be worthy of being called beautiful.
I'm never going to be able to internalize any feeling about my looks and my face in particular aside from I'm unworthy, I'm ugly, I'll never be noticed. I'm going to be the one cropped out of the photos.
Yeah, I think hideously unhappy. What Steve says about this, the dual nature of the way you feel bad, you feel bad because you feel ugly and you feel bad because you feel bad about feeling ugly, right, which is really painful.
That's what leads to despair, I think, when you, when you, you can't even own the feeling you have about your dissatisfaction with the way you look. And that's, that's one area that I do feel like I can be very specifically, you know, implore you to unburden yourself of that.
Right. Most of us spend a whole lot of time thinking about that literal face we showed of the world. Okay, this is why the beauty and the serving cosmetics and plastic surgery and, you know,
I mean, all of the things we do to our faces, even people who aren't like really obsessed with beauty. And so, you know, please don't feel bad about that. It does not make you a shallow person. It doesn't make you a person who values what's on the outside more than you value what's on the inside.
This means that you're up against something, you know, you have a face that doesn't really meet the standards of the culture we happen to live in at this moment in time. And that is a hard thing. And I just want to say to you, I hear that. And I don't think you're wrong for thinking it's hard.
It's an amazing moment from the right at the end of Nora Afron's wonderful essay about her breasts shaping up. I think it's called a few words about breasts and her friends are trying to say, oh, it's okay, you know, really having big boobs is no fun either. And really it's, you know, you were lucky in some ways.
I've got this essay is so striking. She writes, I've thought about my friends remarks. I've tried to put myself in their place. I've considered their point of view. I think they're full of shit.
And it's this daring moment where, where Nora Afron's trying to say, there are some things that are your stuff and you never get past it. You just learn to manage it.
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So we're continuing our discussion of the letter from hideously unhappy who says she's ugly and is having a hard time really coming to terms with that and feels even bad about herself for feeling bad about her face.
We actually have somebody in our studio, which always very exciting. Oftentimes we have to talk to people on the phone, but we're super lucky to have Ariel Henley with us this afternoon. She's a writer and activist for individuals living with facial differences. And she's written for outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, and narratively. And now she has at work on a memoir. Welcome, Ariel.
Thank you. Welcome to the show. Well, why don't we tell us about you? Yeah, we're listening obviously on a podcast. People can see you and you've written about your own facial differences. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, so I was born with cruise on syndrome, which is a cranial facial condition where the bones and the head fuse prematurely. So right when I was born, I looked like a normal healthy baby. And then my eyes started bulging and the shape of my head.
God, a little lopsided and things like that. So I had dozens of surgeries to correct my appearance. So I'm used to standing out from the time I was a child, you know, I'd walk down the street or I'd be a parent to be pushing my sister and I and a stroller and even grown adults would stop and they'd comment.
So I mean, what would they say? Look at her eyes. Oh, what's wrong with her face? I got called ugly for like that was very much a word that was thrown at me from. I don't know as young as I can remember to be honest. And I don't know why, but for a long time, I mean, it's probably just being a resilient child, I guess.
It didn't register. I was like, what are they talking about? Like, who are they looking at? You know, because I was just me. I just can't do my thing.
And then it grew up and I went to school. Kids would say things and then have surgery come back to school, jump right in like nothing happened and then go to middle school with all new kid and it definitely became more of an issue there because I didn't know my story or what had happened.
And then I had bigger surgeries at that time anyway that changed my appearance more than. But when I was a senior in high school, I actually flew to Paris to have a surgery that was supposed to straighten my eyes and move them closer together.
There was like a 50% chance or something super high like that of like brain damage, blindness or death. And I was like, I don't care. It'll make me beautiful. Because in my mind to be beautiful meant to be happy.
So we got to Paris. There was a surgery scheduled like it was it was happening. We talked to the surgeon and it was like hitting like a ton of bricks. I don't want to be here.
I don't know what I was thinking really to be willing to go through that much pain and to potentially die because I hated myself that much.
My mom got us a plane flight home and we went back. I wish I could say and then we lived happily ever after. Obviously no.
We went to school 3000 miles away in Vermont because it was far away from every reminder that I had of surgery and all this painful medical stuff and you had grown up where in California or the California.
So I had applied for colleges and some in California and some on the east coast and I decided right now I want to go away. I want to start over.
And it took taking classes and being intellectually challenged and meeting all kinds of people from different backgrounds and everyone had a unique story. And suddenly I was a part of a campus with I don't know values that aligned with my own.
It was hard. I don't really took a long time but I just kept trying. Even when I had days and months where it's like I just was really depressed and I just didn't want to meet anyone and struggle to make friends.
I just kept trying and keep going.
But to be honest, it got exhausting. It got really, really exhausting to be so focused on just what I looked like because there's so much more to life than that.
And that's really why I started writing and getting involved in activism and that kind of thing. Because I wanted to use my story and my experiences to tell other people like no it's going to be okay.
It's not the end of the world. My eyes are still far apart. They're still crooked. I still get stared at sometimes but it's okay.
Yeah. So what's it been like when you started to get into the world of dating and that kind of courtship romance stuff because to speak to hideously unhappy anxieties and anguish when the idea of not fitting some ideal physically in your face or elsewhere somehow gets attached to the idea I'm going to be alone.
I did try like online dating and Tinder and you know whatever. But yeah, I always post pictures and I get emails too from people who are like, hey, what's wrong with your eyes?
And I'm just like, really? And then of course it turned into want to get dinner? No, not now. Like you're just you just insulted me.
But now I actually I met my boyfriend online and I messaged him here responded and it was never an issue. He not like didn't ask me a single time. Why do you look the way that you do? That was never.
It wasn't an issue.
Well, let's talk about I want to read our second letter and Ariel. I'm so interested to hear what you make of this one. Here we go. Dear sugars, I'm a 25 year old female who has by many accounts lived an extremely privileged and exciting life.
I obtained an international law degree last year and I've lived and worked all over the world. My life has been full of so much beauty and so many rich experiences.
I'm a human rights practitioner who self-worth is based on moral principles and intellect far more than physical appearances. That said, I am still a young female who lives in a very superficial world. And I am by no means above it all.
I used to love getting dressed up going out with my friends to clubs and bars flirting with men from all walks of life. I used to have a boyfriend for every day of the week in every corner of the world.
About two years ago, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that involves the disruption of my hormones. Every month for just over two years now, I experienced severe hives, dizziness, and a fever with my monthly cycle.
Well, this has caused great disruption in my life both personally and professionally. This has not been the main cause of my depression.
With this hormone imbalance has come the horrible discoloration of my face, often termed malasma. What used to be a thick dark patch on my forehead has now also spread into a mustache and blotchy cheeks.
I've tried every treatment imaginable. I took birth control pills which my doctor assured me would help. They did not. I tried steroids. I spent every last penny on laser treatments, bleach creams.
I turned my kitchen into a witch's den, brewing keratin, vitamin E blends, scrubbing my face with apple cider vinegar. I stopped eating gluten and dairy, drowned my body with tumeric.
I tried to will it away through prayer and meditation. I stood upside down for hours, held power poses until my knees collapsed. I visited a shaman in a nicaraguan jungle, a naturopath and Copenhagen.
It has all been to no avail and my skin is beginning to look like a life sentence.
I no longer date. I haven't had a boyfriend for even one day a week in over a year. When I do get dressed up and go out, I feel paranoid that everyone who looks at me is wondering what's wrong with my face.
This disease has caused me a type of self-confidence that I never before even realized I had. I have extremely supportive friends who constantly tell me I'm beautiful and try to make me feel good about myself.
Still, I often find myself getting sucked into a dark path of negativity, where I try to grasp the fact that I may never feel pretty again or that romantically this life may be spent alone.
I would love so much to one day find a partner to share my wonderful adventures with, but I can't imagine dating. I can't even make eye contact with the type of man I used to casually flirt with on idle evenings out.
Along with my ugly skin, this disease has brought out an even uglier side of me. When my skin first started to discolor, I starved myself because if I had to be ugly, I couldn't fathom being fat too. Isn't that disgusting?
I constantly feel myself being pulled back into self-hatred and vanity.
Perhaps most of all, I hate the sappy victim this disease has turned me into. I feel incredibly guilty that I've allowed my amazing life to be disrupted by something so superficial.
When I'm breaking out in hives or having a dizzy spell, I give myself room to grieve for this can often be a painful experience that leaves me feeling powerless and frustrated. But I have not been able to figure out how to comfort myself through this superficial aspect of it.
How do I grieve that I no longer feel pretty without being a complete narcissist?
Where a powerful fearless woman once stood sits a small and insecure little girl. I worry that this will take a toll on my work. I delve into dark issues in my job, and it's important that the fearless woman shows up to tackle these issues and not the insecure little girl.
How can I maneuver my way through the world without any confidence in my physical appearance? How do I come to terms with the fact that I may never feel pretty again? Please, sugars. How do I love myself through this? Yours truly the ugly duckling.
Wow, such sorrow in this letter. I think here again we see this woman continually saying this is superficial. I shouldn't feel this way, but I do.
Again, I want to say that it's actually very understandable, I think, ugly duckling. It's very understandable that you have anxiety and grief about this new condition that you're dealing with that's manifesting itself right there on your face.
And it's the thing you see when you look in the mirror, it's the thing other people see when they see you and there's been a dramatic shift. It's okay to feel that it's okay to be having trouble adjusting to this new way of being in the world.
Yeah, I wonder, Ariel, did you feel at any point in your journey a certain kind of rage or a certain sense of just the injustice of it? Because I feel like underneath the subtext of this letter in some ways is I should be more evolved than this, but I just am furious. I've lost something that I used to have.
Yeah, I mean, I think especially living in a society where especially for women, our worth is in our physical appearance. And so to have something affect your face, especially it's understandable to be mad. I mean, I spend many years angry, like really, really angry.
I can remember being five years old and seven years old and crying to my mom, like, no, take it off. I don't want this. This isn't me. That's not mine. I want my old face back.
And even going into middle school too, just again, having surgery where you wake up and you look very different. And I was awful. I was so mean to everyone around me because it hurts. It hurts so much to be that angry.
And here, ugliness is unhappiness. Yeah, that's it. You mean here in these letters? Yeah, in these letters, ugliness is unhappiness. But okay, let's back up though.
You are obviously pretty evolved on this. You've confronted this in your life. And maybe in part because you did have, you know, from a very early age, you were having these surgeries.
But can you help us come up with some ideas with how she might get to that place you're at now? How does she come to terms with her? Really what amounts to this profound sense of disappointment that she feels that this is her face. This is the face just to live with.
I would honestly say, and this is what I did when I was in, I think it was like seventh grade or something, take a picture of yourself every day and look at it for a few minutes. Just look at it.
And instead of focusing on, oh gosh, like I have a double chin or I have wrinkled whatever. Focus on the things that you like about yourself. Try and flip the narrative.
You know, when you listen to a song for the first time, you're like, it's okay. And then a week later, it's like your favorite song, because you've listened to it so many times and it grows on you.
It's kind of like that where the longer you look at something, the more beautiful it becomes and the easier it is to accept. And then, it's time goes by, you'll start to hopefully feel more connected to those images and feel more connected to yourself.
Yeah, and I think, you know, I think with both letters, but I'm going to speak specifically to ugly duckling is, you know, you do say in your letter that you feel ugly or that, you know, will you ever feel pretty again.
This isn't a state of being, you know, it's actually a state of a feeling.
And, you know, it's hard to pick up and flirt with guys if you won't make eye contact with them. You know, the former you felt confident enough to do that, the new you feels paranoid and sad and weak and insecure.
And all of those things are readable on our faces and in our postures. And I don't mean to falsely kind of, you know, deliver this kind of platy to like you just have to feel pretty to be pretty.
And yet there is some truth to this, you know, that I feel like ugly duckling that the process you need to go through is, you know, really grieving this, this former life of yours where you didn't have this autoimmune disease.
Like that's you have every right as Ariel said to be angry to say I want I want the old thing back.
But eventually when you go deep into those feelings, what rises from that rage is the truth that you can't go back.
And this applies to hideously unhappy too, you know, that you you have that we all have the faces we have and it's up to us to figure out how to inhabit them.
Right. And you can do it one one way that is feeling terrible about yourself and putting that kind of energy out into the world or you can do it another way.
So you know, I do think that that a lot of this is about making hard but conscious decisions about not the way you're going to look, but the person you're going to be inside your body and inside that face.
Ariel, can you talk about that? Like what what do you think being born with these faces that you've had over time? What do you think that they have given you are contributed to your life?
Yeah, it's definitely allowed me to not only connect with myself, but to connect with other people on a deeper level because it automatically weeds people out there are people who want nothing to do with me because of what I look like.
And that's totally fine. Dores right there. Go ahead, keep walking, you know, because the people that are in my life are there because they want to be.
It's not because they're going to get free drinks at the bar when we go out because I'm just so gorgeous like that's probably not going to ever happen. And I'm okay with that.
It allows people to be more vulnerable with you. All of my friendships, it's like we can sit there and we can just like pour our hearts and souls out and you know over a glass of wine and and they trust me because I get it.
Like I understand what it's like to be on the outside. I do always have and now I think that you're learning that. And so it can help you to be kinder too when you see someone else struggling.
It can force you to come to terms with your story and the fact that everyone else has a story too.
It's interesting what you said it especially I hope you were listening ugly duckling what Ariel suggesting is there's a sad irony here you really are probably going to be better at advocating for people who are in one way or another marginalized because you've had the extraordinarily unfortunate privilege of you know being cast out from the world of the beautiful who sail through life in their sort of you know.
A bubble of desirability getting free drinks at the bar and picking up whoever they like and you know I'm not faulting anybody who you know was won that particular genetic lottery but I don't think that's where most people live.
I think if you really gave everybody truth serum they would probably speak a lot more about the ways in which they feel ugly and undesirable than the ways in which they feel desirable and on top of the world.
And there are a couple other books I would read you know just so you know that you're on a journey that lots of other people are for sure Ariel's memoir when that comes out will both be root at the front of the line for that but truth and beauty and patch it or friend and patch it's beautiful book which is about her friendship with Lucy Greeley and does talk a lot about Lucy's struggle from without I think about the work of our friend Stephen Elliott he writes about being an outsider feeling like a physically undesirable person.
Even Serenow the great tragedy of Serenow to Bergerac is a play is that it's a guy who is so attached to the feeling that he's unattractive that even when his love his lifelong love Roxanne knows that he's the one who authored all those beautiful letters to her and who won her heart and he never admits it he goes to his grave feeling ugly it's a kind of dark lesson in what will happen if you don't find a way to record.
And there's a way to recognize that this experience as a teacher.
All right Ariel thank you so much for joining us we appreciate your stories and your insight.
Thank you so much.
Dear sugars is produced by the New York Times and partnership with WBUR our producer is Alexandra Lee Young our editor and managing producer is Larissa Anderson our executive producer is Lisa Tobin and our editorial director is Samantha Henning.
We recorded this show at Argo Studios in New York City with Paul Ruest our mix engineer is Josh Rogasin our theme song is by Liz vice and other music is by the Portland band wonderfully find us at ny times dot com slash dear sugars and please send us your letters at dear sugars at ny times dot com that's dear sugars plural at ny times dot com.
And if you want to read the column every week we answer an additional letter on the topic that we've discussed on the podcast you can find that at ny times dot com slash the sweet spot that's on Tuesdays and on Thursdays in the style section.
