How Being Called ‘The Ugliest Woman In The World’ Changed Lizzie Velasquez’s Life

Until last year, no one could explain why Lizzie Velasquez was the way she was. She was a huge question mark. When she was born, weighing just over three pounds, doctors told her parents she would never talk or walk.

The doctors were wrong. In fact, at 26, she does both professionally. An experienced motivational speaker and self-described “pacer” when speaking, Velazquez was propelled to internet fame in 2013 when she gave a speech at the TEDx Talk in Austin, Texas, called “How Do You Define Yourself? ?”

The speech, which she gave without notes and spontaneously, detailed her experience with cyberbullying, being called “the ugliest woman in the world” and the obstacles she faced in her life. The video took off, receiving a million views within days. Today it has more than 9 million.

Last year, while filming the documentary about his life, Velasquez finally received a diagnosis. She has rare neonatal progeroid syndrome and is one of only three people known to suffer from it in the world. This disorder makes it impossible for her to gain weight – she has zero fat and has never weighed more than 60 pounds – despite how much she eats, which could be as much as 60 times a day.

This disease also causes premature aging and caused her to go blind in one eye.

“There were times when I got really frustrated and angry. I didn’t know who to blame or where to direct my anger. I always made birthday wishes, lit all the candles in the church, and prayed before going to bed. I was like, ‘God, please take this away from me. Please make me normal,'” Velasquez told a crowd at the ESPN Women + Sports Summit in Dana Point, Calif., last week.

Velasquez’s stage presence is extraordinary. She’s a natural – she’s at ease, funny, knows how to laugh at herself and empathize. She told the Huffington Post that she feels most comfortable onstage, and given her childhood experiences, this comes as a big surprise, even for her.

Growing up in Texas, Velasquez was teased, stared at, and often simply ignored. She remembers her first day in kindergarten and realizing, for the first time in her life, that other children were afraid of her. She would go home and ask her parents what was wrong with her. “I consider the answers my parents gave me at the time to be why I do what I do,” she told HuffPost.

“When I asked what was wrong with me they replied that there was nothing wrong. The only difference is that you are smaller than other children. They told me that they would love, support and help me achieve all my dreams,” she added. Her parents treated her like anyone else. However, the world does not. Velasquez remembers going to amusement parks and finding himself an attraction. Groups of adults stopped talking to watch her. She stopped going to the water parks because she couldn’t wear a bathing suit in public.

She used to introduce herself by saying, “Hi, I’m Lizzie and I don’t have an eating disorder of any kind.”

Velasquez said she struggled throughout her time at school to be able to look at herself in the mirror and accept what she saw. With the love of her parents and her two younger sisters, she started to gain confidence. “The five of us were very close. We are a team. And together they managed to make me see that I have options in this life. We can decide whether we feel sorry for ourselves and throw ourselves the biggest mourning party in the world and get stuck with it — or realize there’s this other side to everything we already have in our lives,” Velasquez said onstage.

“We can say, yes, I have this or, no, I don’t have that, rather than saying we wish we had this or comparing ourselves to others. For, in the end, where does all this lead you?”

“Be your kind of beauty.”

In high school, she was on the writing staff of the school newspaper and was a photographer for the school photo album. She got a lot of support when she made the cheerleading squad, though she admits to doing so almost exclusively because of the cute uniform. “I didn’t even realize that you had to really cheer and run and work out. I could come up with good excuses to escape the races!”, she joked with the audience.

However, something deeper drew Velasquez to the idea of ​​wearing the uniform. “Every time I did my cheerleader role I felt like I put on my superhero uniform. I thought I would be seen like any other girl and that was something I desperately wanted,” she said onstage. But at 17, while procrastinating at home to study, Velasquez came across an eight-second video on YouTube that called her “the ugliest woman in the world”, with thousands of views and comments.

“I never imagined that when I opened that video, all the confidence I had in myself would turn to absolutely nothing—vanishing completely,” she told the audience. Some comments said something along the lines of “get a gun, point it at your head and get it over with, get out of this world. He will be so much better this way” and “wear a bag over your head because when people see your face they go blind”.

Velasquez was dismayed. First, she thought about protecting her parents. She feared the video would hurt them more than it already had hurt her. She cried for hours on the floor and even started to question whether the comments were telling the truth. “Maybe I really should leave this world,” she remembered thinking. “If so many people are saying that, then maybe they are right. But there was a voice that told me not to listen. My parents said that we must learn to forgive people because we don’t know what is happening at that moment in their lives”.

The following year, Velasquez went to study at Texas State University. “Over time I discovered that the only way I could show these people that this wasn’t how I would define myself or my truth was to make myself, in some way, become someone better,” Velasquez told the magazine. your audience.

And this materialized in the form of motivational speeches. She started studying famous speakers online and made anti-bullying her cause. Last year she went to Washington, DC to take an anti-bullying campaign to Congress. She has already written three books about her life and a documentary, titled A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story (“Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story”) that will be released this fall.

“That YouTube video turned my life upside down,” Velasquez told the audience. “For a long time I felt alone in the world. But now I know that it’s okay to go through that kind of difficulty. It’s okay to feel vulnerable. It’s okay to feel weak. You need to allow yourself to go through these moments. I guarantee that once you do, you’ll be ten times more motivated to become a better person.”

“I think it’s quite appropriate to post this here! It looks like it was the best ride I’ve ever taken in my life!”

The Huffington Post caught up with Velasquez after the speech about the advice she gives women who are the target of criticism online because of their appearance. She recalls when she joined MySpace in high school and asking her parents what they thought of it. They encouraged her to go in with her eyes wide open, and that’s the advice she gives young people today.

“They told me that just as there are good things, there are bad things. They said if I had negative comments — which unfortunately everyone does — and it didn’t make her upset, then they would,” she told HuffPost.

Velasquez encourages young people to remember that we live in a world of instant gratification, especially when it comes to social media. “Keep in mind that people only share the ‘best’ moments. It seems like they hang out all the time and they have all these friends in these cool places. This is not reality. It might have just been one night,” she said.

“People spend hours in Photoshop. Admittedly, I sit there and try to pick the right filter, but when you do that and post it, you just want the ‘likes’. You want all the likes you can get and nothing more. And now? What do you do with it? If you look in the mirror, no makeup and no touch-ups, and think, ‘Yeah! I like who I see. It’s me.’ You need to get to that point first,” she said.

Velasquez is not shy about admitting that sometimes this is easier said than done. But she finds purpose in the days when she still has doubts about herself. “I feel gratitude on the days I get terrible comments and it still happens quite often. It reminds me that I still have work to do. Reminds me that I have a purpose. Show people that things are going to be tough. I’m the first to admit it. But the light on the other side is indescribable.”

This article was originally published on HuffPost Brasil.