Saying I “grew up ugly” doesn’t mean I was ugly — it meant that I never quite fit in the way other people did, and that's especially difficult when you have been forced to adapt to different standards of beauty your whole life.
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And looking back to the young girl who secretly shaved her legs, I see a girl who just didn’t know how to exist in a body that seemingly developed overnight. But most importantly I see a girl who thinks she is anything but beautiful. I see a girl who was wrong.
Beauty has always felt like this incomprehensible, elusive thing, forever outside of my reach. Running around with a tangled mane of hair and dirt on my face, what did beauty matter?
I tell her I used to wear makeup because I felt bad about my face, but I stopped because wearing makeup felt like covering it up rather than learning to accept it. It's the same argument I made to my mom and grandma. The same argument I still make to myself.
Femininity was an afterthought for her, while it chewed me alive and left me disgusted with myself.
I didn’t believe I had anything to say that would spark someone’s genuine interest in getting to know me, so I relied on my outfits to do the heavy lifting. Then I discovered a new social skill to add to my toolbox: Compliments.
Standing at the grocery checkout with my mom, my eyes level with the Sports Illustrated model. I ask her questions but she doesn't respond. I wondered if she answered his questions. I wonder if he asked her any.
Established in 1918, we’ve spent the last 105 years covering life on campus, and to celebrate our 105th birthday, we took a trip down memory lane.
Calgary is commonly associated with conservativism, oil and gas, extremely cold weather and most importantly, being cowboy crazy. This is something I have run into whenever I introduce myself as a Calgarian. And for the most part, these are all true.
As a child, my parents would take the three of us kids to T&T to buy doujiang. The predictability of the store was comforting. White waxed floors, edged by subtle grime; the smell of plastic wrap and the mist they sprayed to keep the vegetables fresh. The bright lights, the temperature, the layout — these elements create theoretically perfect conditions, yet are too sterile to make me feel at home.
Bashar soon realized how hopeless and immense the climate crisis may seem to many people, deterring them from taking action. He wanted to learn what he could do and what role he could play in climate action in Bangladesh. So he quit his job.
In 2012, UBC held a ceremony to grant these 76 students honorary degrees following years of advocacy to have UBC acknowledge its complicity in internment. Now, a new generation of Japanese Canadian students have made their way back to campus.
My family moved to Winnipeg when I was seven — another family in a long migration of those leaving their homes to start again in what seemed like an isolated tundra. We subscribed to all the Filipino things available to us in Canada: church, any bakery with good pandesal and other Filipinos.
Submitting an unsolicited manuscript to a publisher or agent can feel like rolling a story into a glass bottle and tossing it into Niagara Falls hoping someone at the bottom will catch it. Niagara Fall Syndrome.
Throughout Purghart’s acting career, they’ve seen the gender binary represented on the stage. The now-UBC alum is demolishing the binary while creating spaces for Queer artists through their comedy show That’s Gay!.