There Goes Mr. Ugly Ogre...

He stood in front of the mirror, eyes tracing the faint scars that marked his head—reminders of an accident that had changed his life. There it was again, the same words echoing in his mind: “You are ugly.” It wasn’t just about his appearance; it was the way people had made him feel. Unwanted. Unseen. Undervalued.

Growing up, he had learned to brace himself for the verbal jabs. Sometimes, it was a sneer, a muttered insult under someone’s breath. Other times, it was louder, public, meant to humiliate and strip away whatever confidence he tried to build. “You’re too sensitive,” they would say, brushing off the sting of their words as if it was all a joke. But he never laughed; he only learned to hide the pain.

The cruelty didn’t stop at home. It followed him to work, where colleagues, threatened by his competence, twisted his intentions. They whispered behind his back, painting him as someone to be wary of, someone not worth including. “You’re not a team player,” they’d say. “You think you’re better than everyone else.” It was as if his very presence was a threat, something to be neutralized. In truth, all he wanted was to do his job, to be respected, and to find a sense of belonging.

But that wasn’t how they saw him. His passion, and his drive, were reframed as arrogance. They used his quiet moments against him, labelling him aloof. They saw his hesitation as weakness, an invitation to push him aside. “Why don’t you just leave?” one of them had said with a smirk, words dripping with disdain. And so, he did. Again and again, he would pack up his things, leaving behind places that had promised hope but delivered only heartache.

Yet, the deepest cuts came from the people he had loved the most. He had tried to build a family, a sanctuary where he could be himself without fear. But even there, words became weapons. “You’re not needed.” “Go away.” “We don’t want you.” His heart shattered every time those phrases were thrown at him, sharp and unrelenting. The world he had tried to create for himself and his children crumbled, and he stood alone in the ruins.

The scars on his head were a physical reminder of a moment he could never forget. They told a story of pain and survival, yet people saw them as imperfections, marks of weakness. The accident had changed more than just his body; it had changed how he saw the world and, most painfully, how the world saw him. He often wondered if those scars made him look different, if they added to the reasons why people would say, “You are ugly.”

As he stood there, drenched in the rain, tears mingling with the cold drops on his face, he wanted the sky to swallow him whole. He wanted the lightning to strike, to end the torment once and for all. But it didn’t. Instead, he was left with the echoes of the words, the feeling of being erased, as if he was invisible in a world that didn’t care.

He started writing, pouring his soul into letters and poems. Maybe, just maybe, someone would read them and see the person beneath the scars, beneath the words that had been thrown at him. He wrote to his children, hoping they would understand one day, that they would know how much he had fought to stay, how he was pushed away, not because he didn’t care, but because he was made to feel like he didn’t belong.

He wrote about the days he sat alone, cigarettes in one hand, and a glass in the other trying to drown out the noise in his head. He had never been a smoker, but the weight of it all had pushed him into habits he couldn’t recognize. In the smoke, he saw his pain curling and rising, drifting away, even if just for a moment.

But amid all the hurt, there was a flicker of hope. It was small and fragile, but it existed. He thought about his baby girl, with her endless smile that lit up his darkest days. He thought about the few friends who had seen him, truly seen him, beneath the layers of hurt and misunderstanding. They were the ones who reminded him that he wasn’t ugly, that he wasn’t invisible.

“You are not defined by their words,” one of them had said, and those words, unlike the others, brought warmth. They helped him see that the ugliness wasn’t in him, but in the way people had chosen to treat him. It was their fears, their insecurities, and their need to belittle that had made them lash out.

He realized then that being seen as “ugly” was never about him. It was about the world’s inability to appreciate the beauty of someone who refused to fit into their mould. It was about how his strength, his persistence, threatened the fragile facades others built around themselves.

So, he kept writing. He kept fighting. Because he knew that the words he had been given—those cruel, demeaning words—did not have to be the ones he carried to his grave. He could find new ones. Kind ones. Words that are built, not broken. Words that healed, not hurt.

Moral: In a world that can be harsh and unkind, it’s easy to internalize the cruel words others throw at us. But true strength lies in seeing beyond those words, in recognizing the beauty of our own resilience, and in knowing that the ugliness is not in us but in how others choose to see us.

God Help Us All...

Jacob M