No. Having had some time to think, I withdraw my initial statement for today. Ugly is not the word I am looking for. I don't know the right word though. I don't know if there is a word for it. Non-beautiful?
I know that seems the same but it's not. Ugly can mean not beautiful. It can also mean not pretty or not cute, or not attractive, or not hot. But pretty, cute, attractive, hot, and beautiful all mean very different things. I don't mean that I don't feel pretty/cute/attractive/hot. Although I don't feel some of those.
What I really mean is that I don't feel beautiful or loved. I think you can be all of those other things without being loved. But I think beautiful is something that happens when someone else sees who you are and loves you anyway. It doesn't feel like a physical thing. To me, anyway.
To me, "You're beautiful" = "I love you". Maybe because I know I'm really not very beautiful at all. I'm messed up, and who wants that? No one... So for someone to get close enough to see me, and still think I'm beautiful anyway, takes a great measure of love on their part. A great great measure.
I don't mean to be all emo, or whine about the way I look, because that's not what this is about. I'm just being honest about how it feels to be me right now. I wish I was strong enough to take total comfort in my relationship with God. I know he loves me and is proud of me and thinks I'm a beautiful person. And he is probably the only one who knows how crappy I really am, so that should mean something. I wish it would, but it doesn't.

It is funny just reading over those words I wrote, how different their meanings are to me. Pretty, cute, attractive, hot... some of them are compliments, and some just seem that way... and kind of leave a bitter aftertaste. There is a Wallflowers song called "Invisible City," and it is one of Brianna's favorite songs. She told me once that the reason she liked it so much was because of this one line, "feeling pretty is so hard." She told me it was easy for her to feel attractive, but hard to feel pretty. I can relate to that, I think. When we were in high school Brianna was always the really pretty one that guys, like, drooled over and obsessed about. Usually they obsessed about her to me because I was the best friend-type girl who would be listening to them ramble on about their love while we played videogames or something. And I never felt like I was important or pretty to anyone, I felt more like I was filling a gap that could easily be filled by one of the guys if they weren't busy with baseball practice or hanging out with their girlfriend, or something.
Anyway. In the past year, since Brianna has moved away and I've gotten used to spending more time on my own (and with boys who don't think of me as their sister) I've kinda realized what she means about feeling attractive. Like you can wear a short skirt or a low-cut top and get plenty of attention. And it does not feel good. In fact it feels totally AWFUL.
Well. That's not true. It feels good at first. Then you pause to think about it, and realize being sexually attractive is nothing like being cute, respected, important, or special. Honestly, it feels like you are a whore who could be replaced at any time by any other girl in the entire world who is willing to wear less clothes than you and post pictures of it on the internet.
I remember that when some of my guys friends came home from school for the first time, their jaws sort of dropped. I've changed a little bit in the past year and it is mostly evident in the way that I look. At first it felt really good, like "HA HA. YOU NOTICED I'M A PRETTY GIRL." That lasted about ten seconds. Then it turned into annoyance because they were changing the way they treated me. And I really didn't like it. I felt like I lost some of their respect, because now they treated me the same as they treated every other girl they knew.
Over the last year I've been seeing this more and more, and I have many explanations for it, probably because for the first time I have been dressing in something other than sweatpants every day. And I've been flirting a lot. I never used to flirt at all but in the past year that's changed. I don't like that about me. Around my guy friends I feel like every other girl instead of like their friend.
I don't know what I want. I guess I would rather feel unattractive and appreciated for who I am than feel the way I am feeling now.
I don't even know why I am posting this because there is no good reason to, mostly I just want to get it out of my head, but it does not make me feel any better, in fact writing about it makes me think of examples of it, and then I feel worse.
Haha. Oh boy. I should have just stuck with ugly, and not explained it.