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Carrying a comically large backpack, I stepped out of the plane and sped through the terminal listening to ​​Erin Mendenhall, the mayor of Salt Lake City, welcome me to her city.

Medusa struggles to let someone hold her femininity in their hands. She fears opening herself up, showing the most sacred part of herself to a room that sees her snakes as a poor excuse for what a woman is supposed to have.

When I was younger, I never understood why the spots on my face were called beauty marks when they didn’t make me feel more beautiful, but quite the opposite in fact.

Though my mom would hold my eyebrow skin taught, when I looked in the mirror, I’d smile at myself. Not because I thought I looked better — or fundamentally different, even — but because I felt better. I felt like an adult. I felt like a woman. And I felt brown.

i used to wish i was a boy / because i thought / i would get / the benefit of the doubt / from a culture that loved / what i wasn’t.

From a queer perspective, the idea of embodying something genderless is incredibly empowering. But I understand not everybody wants to cosplay as a plant.

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.

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.

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