Diary of a beautiful woman

Tumie Modise | Monday March 31, 2014 16:47

Everyone who knows my family (the Modise’s) can testify that I come from a family of unbelievably beautiful girls. Whenever our family is gathered for weddings or even funerals, most people often mistake such gatherings for beauty pageants or some other such parades! Now somebody curiously asked me the other day to share with them my experiences of being a ‘beautiful girl’.

You see, being perceived as’ beautiful’ has its own ups and downs. In fact, the downs always seem to have an upper hand. I don’t know of anyone who enjoys being told they are beautiful.  Not surprisingly, my journey as a supposedly beautiful young woman hasn’t been all that rosy to this day. It’s been more of a curse than anything. For one thing, if you are deemed as beautiful, people always overlook other qualities about you then focus more on the so-called beauty part of you, which is often an injustice I must say. Some of these beauty pageants are not helpful either. They tend to portray beautiful young girls as just pretty and empty shells. I have never been a beauty queen myself; the closest I have ever come to participating in such contests was back in primary school when my sister walked away with the crown while I clinched the third position after we were both forced to participate in one such contest.

The one thing I dislike most about being deemed beautiful is the wrong attention as well as the negativity. Some people can be so mean and hateful! The first time I tasted a dose of such negativity was when I was in my teens. Decades later, it’s been a downhill spiral! If it’s not your friends being competitive with you even for trivial things such as the colour of your lipstick, then it’s the opposite sex hating you for not entertaining them! While attention from the opposite sex can be very flattering at times, it is not always a pleasant or welcome experience. Some guys just want to punch above themselves, period. For one thing, when a person makes a move on you, you almost always know how the whole thing will play out and end.

It’s almost like a scripted movie, only that in this case you are both the director as well as the star actress. If I were to count, I would say in my whole life I have been approached by roughly 70 people, with 30 or so of that number making it to the semifinals, yet only a handful making it to the grand finale.

Now the thing I dislike the most is when you decide just to be kind and humanitarian to a guy, even against your better judgment. Like there was this one who once made my life a living hell back in secondary school. The young man, although only a few years older than me, was a worker at my school and didn’t stand even the faintest chance at all. He was the persuasive type. He wouldn’t take no for an answer and as weeks passed, he started being forceful and aggressive. Only a hot clap courtesy of my dad finally ended the nightmare for me.

Men have different approaches too and often employ different methods of skinning the proverbial cat. The only problem is, many often don’t seem to realise that girls are very different. Unlike taxi drivers, we do not come from the same mother so to speak. Admittedly men/boys are different too. Some are unbelievably romantic and do it the romantic way (candles, flowers, chocolates, movies etc) while others get straight to the point without wasting anybody’s time. Unromantic as it sounds, I prefer the latter group.

(To be continued)