At only her second birthday party, she was gifted a lizard. It was no ordinary lizard though, it colored changed based on the way she treated it. Her parents and doctors thought it looked rather alluring, but not everyone saw it the same way. Especially herself. As she grew, she started noticing them stare at her lizard in peculiar ways. For some reason, they didn’t see its beauteousness, they said it looked hideous and deformed. Some were afraid that they would catch a disease from it. Distraught, she decided to get a metal cage for her lizard. She realized that even she had started to see her lizard as vile and monstrous. She desperately tried to hide it from everyone, in the cage she bought. Sometimes, they would catch glimpses of her lizard, and so she adapted, adding more layers to her cage. 

Years later, the lizard was so hidden that she wondered if it was even there. She hadn’t wanted to hide something more in her life. Slowly, a new type of anxiety enveloped her. What if it escaped? The fear was so powerfully mortifying that she went into a daze of endless paranoia. She couldn’t even do things she liked, if they were linked to it. One wrong move, and her secret lizard would escape. This beautiful gift that she had been given when she was a small child, turned into a painful curse that obliterated every part of her life. Perhaps the hard work she had done to conceal her lizard was not for her, but for them. Perhaps it was not her working hard at all, but actually a process of her paralyzing fear of it escaping taking over. She could never believe that her lizard was worth anything because she herself had already decided that all it could ever be viewed as was grotesque and repugnant.

 One night, a perturbing question pestered her, if she had been given this gift, why was she treating it so harshly? Unable to reply, she got tired of satisfying them and sought to be true to herself. Afterall, it was just a lizard, and why had their opinions mattered at all? With this, she closed her eyes, clasped her hands and took her lizard out of its prison. She faced their judgment. She concluded, it was beautiful. She was beautiful. They were beautiful because of her strength to accept it for what it was-- she chose it to be beautiful.