This story is the closest to my soul song.

The ugly duckling travels, a lot.
Mostly alone.

After a while she realises, she isn’t traveling, just being passed from one house to another, to be fostered.

You see, her mother hated her for not being pretty like the rest of the family, and threw her out of the house when she barely had wings.

At each house, they tell her how ugly she is, how she has no talents, and what she thinks is intelligence, isn’t needed.

So she hides, and does not wish to speak her truth.

‘Our mothers made us feel ugly.
As their mothers did.
Our fathers made us feel ugly.
As their fathers did.’

Sometimes they fell for neighbors, sometimes it was a fortuneteller or a religious mumbo jumbo person.

They remembered to pray and nourish stone statuettes and crosses, they forgot to nourish our souls, and then wondered why we spouted ugliness.

If you look at the world through a new lens, in our eyes we are all swans.
Those foster families will always see ugliness in us.

As we become, we shed those old ways, find ourselves, discard all that the foster parents taught us, we find life.