Lizzie Velasquez

I stumbled across Lizzie Velasquez through the worst of the internet. Someone had filmed her in high school and uploaded it with the title The Ugliest Woman in the World. It got millions of views.

She has a genetic condition that makes it impossible for her to gain weight. At 24, she’d never weighed more than 31 kilograms. She’s blind in one eye. The condition is so rare that maybe three people on the planet have it.

When she found the video, she didn’t disappear. She started traveling and talking about it—not in some inspirational-recovery way, just straight: here’s what it’s like to be stared at constantly, to watch people you know dehumanize you online.

What gets me is that she didn’t perform some bigger narrative about it. She just refused to vanish. The video is still there. The comments are still cruel. And she went out and lived anyway.

There’s something in that refusal that I think about more than I should when I’m standing in front of a mirror worried about something trivial.