Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.

This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point.

All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.

Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.

Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.

I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.

I treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated. I thought I simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly, and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong.