Growing Up Ugly
Being the ugly Black girl until the culture caught up.
I grew up ugly. Not in the way a mirror might suggest, but in the way a world designed for someone else can make you feel when you don’t fit. As a Black girl moving through very white classrooms, friendship circles, and later the workplace where my features were foreign and my presence an exception or token gesture, “pretty” rarely had room for someone like me. I wasn’t exactly butters… but I was other. And in the quiet, insidious hierarchy of a predominantly white world, “other” is often left hanging at the bottom.
When you grow up as the “other”, you learn early doors that pretty isn’t just about looks. For me it was about proximity to whiteness, to palatable, to the familiar. And when you’re not any of those, you’re dashed off the spectrum entirely. When you’re not the standard you become an experiment. A novelty.
The one who’s “pretty… for a Black girl.”
I was 5 when a white kid I liked said, “you look like poo because you’re brown.” I was 10 when a boy I fancied said, “…can I just call you ‘shit’ instead of Shem because it’s easier and you look like one.” And I remember I was 13 when another boy at school said he didn’t fancy me because “…all Black girls are ugly.” We thankfully moved on from faecal matter but the sentiment was the same.
I didn’t even like the little prick because his teeth looked like they had been through a recession and never recovered! And let’s be real… my big confused baby lesbo heart was probably silently yearning for one of my girl besties… BUT this lad saying with his full chest that my Blackness was ugly, felt horrendous. When it came to how I looked, I knew I wasn’t considered an ogre by Sugar magazine standards, but I was also overwhelmingly aware that I wasn’t the type of pretty that anyone wanted to woo. And if they did, I was treated less like a crush and more like a curiosity they wanted to sample.
“I’ve never had Black pussy before…” said to me by an older work colleague, IN work, in front of everyone when I was 16. Their attention wasn’t attraction; I was just a shortcut to a fetish. Not pretty and not desirable. Just exotic bait for whatever Black girl fantasy they’d picked up from porn.
But this isn’t a story about seeking validation or nervously laughing over old wounds. It’s about how being cast outside the frame of being ‘fit’, forced me to bend the lens.
You start performing. Brilliance, confidence, sarcasm, whatever armour works that day. You push harder, because you assume you have to. I had to be the best at sports. I had to be everyone’s best friend. I had to be the personality hire for all occasions. I had to build a place where authenticity was a necessity, resilience a reflex, loudness a shield and self-definition an act of liberation. Excellence becomes your baseline, because average never felt like an option.
By the time adulthood rocked up, I was fluent in over-compensation. At work, I’m the most prepared person for a pitch. In friendships, I’m the “obvs Shem will be there” reliable pal. In creative spaces, I always have to think 10 steps ahead, knowing my ideas will be challenged more, questioned more and sometimes stolen more. I’m used to taking up space and justifying it at the same time. An exhausting double shift that no one else notices, because I’ve been doing this shit since I was a yute!
Add being a massive gay in the mix and it’s struggle bus all day long! Another casual layer of “other”. Sound.
I walk into rooms knowing I’ll be misread before I’m understood. But after years of microaggressions and unconscious biases, the toxicity feels less like danger and more like décor. Embracing my queerness kinda made me feel more empowered and intentional about being THAT girl. It forced me to choose myself long before it was fashionable.
What people often misunderstand is that growing up ugly didn’t break me. It coached me like a sweaty Rocky training montage with a rousing 80s power ballad soundtrack! It sharpened my voice. It gave me a certain British-Caribbean resilient swagger. The kind built on side eye, humour and never letting anyone’s bullshit go unchecked. The same kind of ‘fuck around and find out’ self advocacy energy born from immigrant parents who struggled harder than I ever will.
Growing up ugly left no room for wallowing when there was work to be done. It made me creative because the world didn’t offer me scripts I wanted to follow, so I wrote my own. It made me walk into white spaces with a chin held slightly higher, not out of pride, but out of survival.
Growing up ugly taught me how to see myself clearly, long before the world ever learned to pronounce my full government name! It gave me a kind of clarity of knowing that other people’s perceptions ain’t none of my business. Their beauty standards could never handle the curves of my hips and volume of my lips, with a limited imagination that couldn’t see me for shit. Growing up ugly gave me the freedom to define beauty in a way that didn’t centre the gaze of people who never truly saw me.
The irony is that the same society that once dismissed melanated girls like me now celebrates everything we were mocked for. The curves, the words, the skin, the confidence… the audacity. All the things that made us “too much” became the blueprint for ‘cool’. But by the time that cultural shift happened, my elderly Black ass had already stopped waiting for recognition. I’d already built a self that didn’t require permission to run tings in an unseasoned world that didn’t look like me.
This isn’t a sob story. It’s a roadmap of the messy moments that shaped me even if I didn’t realise it at the time. A reminder that sometimes the world can underestimate you so profoundly that the only reasonable response is to become undeniable as fuck! To step into rooms louder. To deliberately take up space and redirect the narrative with the sharpness of someone who’s had to fight to be understood.
Sure, I grew up ugly but I also grew up aware.
And that’s far more dangerous.