Michelle Elman - Am I Ugly?

AM I UGLY?

Michelle Elman

www.readanima.com

In todays world of supplements, celebrity diets and social media, its very easy to be hard on ourselves about the way we look. With all this pressure to strive for perfection aesthetically, it is easy to forget how damaging this can be psychologically.

Michelle Elman is a leading part of the body positivity movement that has been gathering momentum to liberate people from these unrealistic standards, recognise that all bodies are equally valuable and broaden the billboard definitions of beauty.

Am I Ugly? is this inspiring womans compelling and deeply personal memoir that describes her childhood experiences of life-threatening health problems, long stays in hospital and fifteen complex surgeries that left her scarred, both mentally and physically. The narrative follows Michelles journey from illness to health, and from childhood to adulthood as she deals with her body-confidence issues to embrace both her scars and her body and help others to do the same. This remarkable book grapples with the wider implications of Michelles experiences and the complex interplay between beauty and illness.

For every child that is lying in a hospital bed wondering what they did to deserve this you arent alone.

Some of the names of both people and places in this book have been changed in order to protect the dignity and privacy of the innocent and particularly, the not-so innocent. Identifying details about individuals and locations have also been changed, but the stories that are told within this book are all factual and accurate to my recollection.

The events that occur are exactly how I remember them happening at the time; however, as with any story, my experience will be biased by my own perceptions. This is my most authentic truth and I take solace in knowing that I would be the villain in someone elses story but for now, this is mine.

My school uniform a kilt and pinstriped shirt was clinging to the carpet. The lavender tie around my neck was tangled and trapped under my elbow, restraining me even further. I felt a prickling sensation on my face where it had hit the floor and my head was throbbing. It took a while for the sounds of the room to return. I heard the girls screaming, and then I heard them being silenced.

Footsteps approached slowly.

It was Mrs Wright, my teacher.

Stand up.

I had fainted at school, the second time in the week. It was my first year at boarding school in England. I was just eleven, a small and skinny girl with a tight ponytail and bright pink and purple glasses. There had been the usual stresses of adjustment to a new school and being away from home for the first time, and these had been compounded by migraines. Terrible migraines. The week before, as term exams approached, the pain had been so excruciating that Id had difficulty standing. In the nurses office I was given a painkiller and a cool cloth for my head and sent on my way, back to class. Later, when I became dizzy and fainted, I was taken to the medical centre for further examination. The diagnosis: I was coming down with the flu.

When the flu didnt come, I returned to class and fainted again. I was taken to see another doctor, who diagnosed my problem as emotional. Stress was the culprit. The mega-hothouse climate of St Keyes, where girls from all over the world came to a remote and boggy corner of the British Isles to receive a traditional education and compete with each other on a microscopic level in every aspect of their lives academically, socially, musically, right down to who had the best handwriting was to blame. The school motto: Trust, Encouragement and Mutual Respect, which was drilled into us constantly, to the point of misery, had done little to mitigate the pressure.

The doctor had declared that I was stressed from the workload and exams and told me to take it easy, try to relax, and rest. I did as I was told or as much as a St Keyes girl knew how to rest. While I spent the entire weekend in bed, my friends took turns sitting beside me and helping me review my course material and study. Exams, just a little more than a week away, were considered the benchmark of the entire year; so while I could rest my body physically, my brain couldnt take the same kind of break. With this in mind, I began attending class again.

That morning, a Saturday, I was preparing for chapel when I began to feel weak again. I visited the nurse who gave me a painkiller, slapped a futile cooling strip across my forehead and told me that I needed to return to class. But the throbbing in my head was excruciating. I walked to class crying.

What I havent yet explained is that having a so-called headache wasnt new to me. Its not that I was used to them you never get used to that kind of knives-in-the-brain pain but Id been having them ever since I could remember. I have a condition called hydrocephalus, which is an excess of cerebrospinal fluid. This condition had led to a series of surgeries when I was younger, the last being when I was seven, in order to ensure the fluid was draining correctly. It is this fluid that causes extreme pressure in the brain and as a consequence, all-consuming agony when your brain feels like it is pushing on the edges of your skull and the pounding is relentless. Bam . Bam . Bam . Throbbing . Throbbing . Throbbing . As though your brain is trying to hammer its way out of your head or escape, like an animal clawing at a cage that its trapped inside.

*

My lesson that morning was with Mrs Wright, one of the most senior members of the school staff, a harsh and stuffy woman with a hollow, haggard face, short-cropped white hair and a long bony body. As soon as I entered the class, she reprimanded me for being late and told me to take a seat. At my desk, I lowered my tear-stained face and rested it on my crossed arms, hoping the migraine would ease off and the painkillers would kick in. But the pain and pressure only increased.

When I began to cry again, one of my friends asked if she could go into the cupboard and get my pillow. I had made it in textiles class: a blue pillow, decorated with a bright red cherry on the front. In the last few weeks, these headaches had become even more frequent and my friends knew I often put my head down on it during the breaks between lessons. This time, though, the pillow didnt help and I continued to cry. And I guess my sobbing had become audible.

*

Michelle, I am finding it very hard to teach when you are being so loud, Mrs Wright said. Can you keep it down?

When I wasnt able to be quiet enough, she ordered me to leave the classroom. I stood, following her orders. I suddenly felt weak and unstable. I walked as far as the door and opened it, when I felt all the energy drain out of my body. I collapsed on the floor just at the threshold between hallway and classroom and lost consciousness for a split second, then awoke feeling out of focus and confused. I could feel the carpet burn on my face. Some of the girls in the class were screaming.

She is going to be fine, Mrs Wright announced in a deadpan voice. I remember thinking, even then, that her blas-detached manner was very strange. Shes just being a drama queen. Michelle, stand up, stop being silly. This isnt funny.

Was I being a drama queen? Every time I had complained, cried and caused my parents to worry over the years, I had elaborately and carefully weighed the risk of that. I hated asking for special treatment. I hated making anybody worry. Ever since I could remember, people had been anxious around me, fretting and worried. As a baby I was listless, unable to sit up, and never learned to crawl. There was very little known about hydrocephalus in Hong Kong, where my family lived, and the doctors were largely inexperienced in how to solve it. The usual treatment is to instal shunts or, as I called them in my childlike language, tubes, which drain the water from the brain to the stomach. In Hong Kong, however, these tubes were installed in my body incorrectly and resulted in infections and blood poisoning and left a latticework of surgical scars that cross my stomach and head. The drugs werent much better. At the hospital in Hong Kong I got the nickname Barney, after the childrens TV character, because whenever the doctors tried a new drug on me I turned purple. Eventually my parents flew me to Los Angeles, where a neurosurgeon at UCLA properly diagnosed and treated me, with even more surgery partly to fix the bad work that had been done before. By the time I was seven, seven different surgeries had taken their toll on my body.