The other day I was sitting in my room watching these lovely daffodils I had got recently slowly blooming into beautiful flowers, and it got me thinking about how gradually we as people bloom into the people that we are, as cliche as it sounds, it is true. As we grow older we do start to learn more things about ourselves, we progress as characters and people, we don’t remain the same person our whole lives do we?

For me, I have always been a real life DUFF. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, there was a film about it a few years back (GREAT film, I recommend) where a teen girl learns that she is the Duff in her friend circle. For clarification if you haven’t seen it, the Duff is a ‘designated ugly fat friend’… now, to be clear, a lot of the time Duff’s aren’t necessarily fat or ugly. It’s just the term used, but what they are, is less attractive than their friends. The concept of the Duff is that they are the least appealing one among a hot crowd, so people use them as their ‘gateway’ shall we say, to get to the ‘hot friends’. It sounds harsh I know, but it’s the world we live in.

I have been the Duff since I was little, I had a hot sister (obviously as kids she was not referred to as hot, more cute/pretty) and people would sometimes befriend me to get close to her.. I even had guys say things like ‘how can you be sisters? she’s really pretty.’ Somehow as I grew older as well, I ended up befriending the most gorgeous girls. You know the ones who have the most perfect filtered selfies all the time, the guys follow them round with their tongues half way down their chin. All that crap. I was never really the desirable one among the crowd. I was popular sure, but more as the girl that the guys would love to hang out with and have jokes with, not hook up with. In hindsight, this wasn’t always the worst thing because my friends did tend to get really hurt by some of these guys for messing them all about, and I’ve been used enough in my life by shitty men that I don’t need to then add half the guys my friends slept with to that number. But anyway, my self esteem was extremely burst and I struggled a lot being the Duff among my friends.

The hardest thing, about spending your life being the least attractive one, is that sometimes you can have some horrid groups of friends that see you as a project. Projects are all well and good in films like Clueless, but one of the important things you should always remember about people is, sometimes they are happy being what and who they are. Maybe they don’t want to change!! I’ve never thought I was the hottest girl going, evidently being the Duff has proven the opposite. But I am… comfortable with how I present myself, and I think every girl and guy should feel that way about themselves. Previous friends would make strange backhanded compliments to me which were actually quite hurtful… like “Oh my god can I take your make up off and put something else on, I have a cool look for you” or “maybe you should try doing this instead” or my personal favourite: “don’t worry, a guy once told me that guys go for pretty girls when they’re having fun but when they settle down they’ll go for the average ones”… Now although sometimes, when my friends were saying things like this, they were doing so with good intentions, I don’t think all of my previous female friends were intentionally spiteful, it can be quite a bruiser to have people constantly point out the improvements you should make to yourself.

People need to be more respectful of how a person wants to feel in their own skin.

I would like to say as this post goes on that I’m not the Duff anymore or that I now see myself as beautiful or whatnot, but this isn’t entirely the case right now. I’m in my thirties and I still struggle with self esteem issues, (as my previous posts have pointed out). I have a new set of female friends now, who I have had for a good few years now, who don’t make me feel like I’m the Duff. And I think that is what is important. There is something I’ve also learnt from growing up as a Duff as well, it’s a matter of opinion. My friends – the good eggs that I’ve had for the last few years, have never made me feel like I need to improve myself. In fact, we have many debates over how pretty we think the other one is. Me and my best friend in particular, have constant little WhatsApp rows over who is the prettier one. She’s always been drop dead gorgeous and has the most banging eyeliner, hair colours, great boobs, like the ideal alternative chick, and I’ve always envied how gorgeous she is. Yet, she argues with me about the fact that she envies how I don’t wear a lot of make up and I still always look beautiful without even trying. In fact, today I messaged her about how low I was feeling about how stupid I am when it comes to the opposite sex and how ugly I felt (she’s used to me having these vents at her a lot) and without me asking for opinions or anything, she sent me back my WhatsApp profile picture and had basically scribbled on it all these qualities she saw in my features, and also sent me a long paragraph about how although it frustrates her that I wouldn’t see it for myself, she thought that I was beautiful, amazing etc. And this is the sort of friend I could have done with in my late teens and early twenties. Instead of the one’s who made me feel like I was always in need of ‘improvement’.

Being the Duff can be a bummer, but it’s also a blessing. Do you know why? Because I learnt to be happy with who I am naturally, and the truth is, everyone to some extent can be the Duff. I’ve learnt over the years that not everyone’s taste is the same, and I’ve had guys I’ve dated tell me they don’t see the fascination with some of my friends who I perceive as the hottest girls alive – because as the saying goes Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I’ve learnt over the years that, as much as it upset me sometimes, because it is a mega downer when you’ve deleted Tinder and Bumble for the 20th time this year as you still have no one notice you or you make a fool of yourself because you accidentally view a hot guy you saw on a dating app’s insta story or like their pic (don’t even pretend that we all haven’t been there!) but, I then sit there and think – do I really want to have LOADS of guys chasing after me? No actually, I don’t need guys after me for artificial reasons. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it is lovely to be attractive to someone and we all no matter what we say, do go by physical attraction with people and we want to be attractive to people, but also, the looks only get us so far don’t they, and I’d rather wait patiently for a guy to find me and fall for me then have loads of guys fall at my feet for stereotypical reasons alone.

As the film The Duff quite kindly points out, we’re all duff’s in our own way. Some of us will feel like it a lot more than others do, however, whether we are the one who everyone thinks is the real life Duff or whether we’re beautiful to people without even knowing that we are, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the last year battling my insecurities it is this: The only one who has control over how I look and how I perceive myself is me. I read a book (more than once) called ‘What A Time To Be Alone‘ by Chidera Eggerue and it literally changed my life. She spends the entire book pretty much explaining to us that the only person who can love you for who you are is yourself, ‘We can each decide our own fate’ is one of the captions on the back of the book, and she is so spot on. We have the control over what our fate is. I’m not saying that this means that we suddenly decide oh I don’t wanna be single anymore, and we then suddenly find someone, because life is about things happening to us for a reason and at the right time. I truly believe that the reason why I still constantly feel like a Duff and I haven’t managed to thoroughly enjoy being myself and settle down yet is because I still have a lot of work to do on myself.

I’m now at a point where I’m taking a hiatus from dating, because I got so fed up of chasing people that made me feel more Duff-like than ever, I needed a break from being what felt like ‘the ugly duckling of tinder‘ who would basically get matches from people who just wanted an ego boost but never even considered taking me out on a date (it does not do wonders for anxiety let me tell you). I’m at a point where, I’m actually finally okay with being the Duff but also, I’m okay with looking at myself as a work in progress. I’m working on being confident in myself and happy with who I am.

So then hopefully, should someone who isn’t using me to get to my friends comes along, I won’t need them to tell me how awesome I am because I will know that myself already deep down. We should always have relationships to add to our happiness. Not define it.