Entry for "Astronomy" at "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Challenges and Assignments)"
Task: Write about someone who cannot see their own beauty, be it inner beauty or outer beauty.
Extra Prompt: "If you want someone to love you, you have to love yourself first."
"If you want someone to love you, you have to love yourself first."
That was a sentence that Fay Dunbar had heard countless times, from numerous people, and she could understand why people were saying something like this. Honestly, she could also see how it worked out for other people, really.
But for herself, it did not.
Fay did not understand how she was supposed to love herself when there was nothing exceptional about her, nothing that made her proud. She was an average student, did not have any interesting hobbies that could possibly wake someone's interest into her, and she was the opposite of an outgoing person.
And most importantly, she was not seeing how someone could be attracted to her based on her outer appearance. Fay did not think that she was ugly, but whenever she looked into the mirror, she was able to find countless things about her face or her body that were unattractive in her opinion, and some of these things even caused her to feel outrightly uncomfortable in her own skin because they bothered her, and she was sure that other people were able to notice these things just as clear as she was.
She was tall, taller than the average girl, and for a few years, she had been taller than all of the boys in her year, something they had made fun of, and well, today she was sure that no one would want a girl who was that tall.
Thanks to her height, she had very long legs, but most of the time, she did not find them attractive – Fay had done a lot of sports in her earlier teen years – her lower legs were okay, a little bit muscular, but not too much, but her thighs bothered her a lot, as they were pretty big, and not only muscle.
Another thing that she did find unattractive about herself were her broad hips, and the flabs that she had there. The other girls in her dormitory were thinner there and were able to wear all those beautiful dresses in which Fay felt fat.
But her negative feelings towards her body did not stop there, no, Fay also did find a lot to complain about in her face.
Her skin had red spots and always gleamed a little bit, no matter what kind of make up she used to try to conceal it. She found that her nose was too big and the corners of her mouth seemed to be turned down when she relaxed her muscles, and also her eyebrows never seemed to look right, no matter how much time she would spend in front of the mirror, trying to pluck them into the right shape.
Also, her voice was not the strongest or most noticeable one – her best friend Leanne would sometimes joke that Fay's voice broke sometimes while speaking because she did not use it often enough.
The only thing that she liked about herself were her eyes, even though they also looked asymmetric on pictures. They had a nice shade of brown, a little bit like chocolate, with tiny, nearly golden lines running through it, and her lashes were exceptionally long and dark. But who would love her only because of her eyes?
A long time later, Fay would learn that Fred Weasley had not seen her eyes or her body in general first. He really had not seen her at all in the moment he had fallen in love with her. Fred only had heard her laughing.