I haven't been awake past 10pm since this photo was taken in 2009.

#1 You start thinking about contents insurance.

You don’t own anything apart from a bicycle, a Nintendo 64, and the electric frying pan with the melted handle that your mother gave you when you moved out of home.

But still.

Maybe you should insure that junk, because it’s better than having nothing, right?

It’s not.

#2 Your personal comfort becomes more valuable to you than looking good.

You decide that you were stylish enough when you were younger and now it’s time to be warm and have free movement of your limbs when you go out.

I assume so, anyway.

I was never stylish at any age.

I wore hand me downs.

From my brother.

#3 Your hangovers become brutal.

They used to set in as a gentle headache, then ease off after a strong coffee and 4 hash browns.

Now they break down your door at 7am and smash you in the face with all the force of a date rapist.

#4 It becomes harder to keep the weight off.

You used to eat like a 12 year old boy, but you had an arse like one too.

Now you have an arse like Jack Osbourne.

Before cocaine.

#5 When you buy cereal, you choose the ones that promise to lower your cholesterol.

Whatever that is.

#6 You start getting along better with your parents.

You realise they’re not so bad.

You stop planning ways to spend your inheritance because you don’t want them to die so much anymore.

#7 When someone offers you free drugs, you say no because you have work in the morning.

Just kidding.

I would never do that.

Me: Check out that figure skater!
Him: I could never have sex with her. She’s too graceful. It would be like putting tomato sauce on a really nice steak.

Me: Damnit, my pants shrank.
Him: Are you sure?
Me: Yes, I just got them out of the dryer.
Him: Maybe you’ve put on weight.
Me: I haven’t put on weight. These pants fit perfectly yesterday, now they’re too tight. Clearly, they’ve shrunk.
Him: They look the same to me. That’s all I’m saying.

Him (on the phone): Hey, I’m just at the pub with Annik. Yeah, she’s right next to me. What’s she wearing? Well she’s got what appears to be a curtain wrapped around her waist, tied with a piece of cheap rope; a faded non-descript black singlet; and sunglasses that definitely cost less than $15. In fact, I’m pretty sure she found them on the side of the road.

Him: I literally have nothing to wear. All my clothes are in the wash.
Me: You can borrow one of my shirts, if you want?
Him: It’s okay, all your stuff is too man-ish anyway.

Mum’s friend: I hate to say it, but your cat’s getting a little chunky.

Me: So’s your face.

When I was fifteen, I worked in the créche at my parents’ church. This meant I had to look after other people’s whining children and sometimes take them to the toilet and wipe their bums, but at least I didn’t have to listen to the sermon.

One Sunday, there was a new kid in the créche who seemed to take a liking to me. We played for half an hour and read some books together, then she said she wanted to draw a picture of me. I was flattered and sat on a beanbag in front of her, posing for my portrait.

“Now you have blue eyes…” she said, selecting a sky-coloured crayon. “And then brown hair… and a yellow t-shirt… and a BIIIIIG belly!”

“Church is finished,” I told her, holding in a scowl. “I’ll mind your picture until your parents are leaving. You can come back and collect it then.”

After she left to find her mum and dad, I scrunched her picture into a ball and threw it in the bin. Then I walked down to the takeaway shop and bought a large tub of hot chips. I decided I would not have children if they all turned out to be such nasty little shits.

Mum: Is that your new top?

Me: Yep. Like it?

Mum: It has horizontal stripes.

Me: Yeah, so?

Mum: You should wear vertical stripes, darling. They’re more slimming.

When I was in primary school, we were visited once a year by the Life Education Australia van. This was a caravan manned by chirpy women who used a giraffe puppet (Healthy Harold) and a nude mannequin (Tammy) to educate third graders on drugs and general health. I didn’t care much for Harold, but I was fascinated by Tammy and her womanly figure, which I would never develop. Her plastic skin had been shaven away on one side, exposing her plastic internal organs. I wanted to reach out and stroke her plastic liver, then tweak her plastic nipple. I was shy though.

Healthy Harold taught us about the food pyramid and advised us to exercise regularly. He then launched into an anti-drug tirade and touched on the dangers of peer pressure as well as the legal and socio-economic factors involved with drug abuse and their long-term effects on society. I spent these lessons staring at the caravan ceiling, which was covered in tiny fake stars, and thinking about my silk worms, but the message was so strong, it seeped completely into my eight year old brain anyway. If anyone had offered me a cigarette, I would have urinated on their entire packet and rang the police immediately. If thirty of my classmates had stood in a circle and chanted “CHUG, CHUG, CHUG,” I would have tipped my bottle of beer down the nearest drain and raised my face to the sky, arms outstretched, before calling out the twelve steps and giving glory to God. I was completely staunch in my resolve: I would never drink or smoke. I would certainly never take drugs. I would be healthy. I would be happy. I would be like Harold.

Four years later, my great-grandmother died. She was ninety-seven years old, and had been in a nursing home for six months. I remembered the day she was put into the nursing home, because my father was very tense and simply told me, “She fell over.” But through eavesdropping on my mother’s phone conversations, I was able to piece together all the details: Nan had gotten out of bed during the night to get a glass of water, then she had fallen over on her way back from the kitchen, breaking her hip and smashing her head against the floor, knocking herself out. Unable to get back up after she regained consciousness, she simply remained on the floor and waited for somebody to find her. By the time my grandfather arrived in the morning to take her to church, she had ripped up half the carpet in her living room in an attempt to keep herself warm throughout the night. She had torn up her hands doing this, and managed to cut her arms on broken glass. She had also shat herself and was crying with embarrassment.

This single agonising, undignified event completely horrified me. “Why couldn’t she get back up again?” I asked my mother, interrupting her phone call.

“She’s just too old,” Mum explained, “The body starts to give up and stop working after a while.”

This distressed me deeply. The idea that I could one day find myself unable to walk or wipe my own arse was the most depressing thing I had ever contemplated. And the thought of my great-grandmother lying amongst broken glass on her kitchen floor, nursing a smashed hip and a bruised face, scratching at the carpet and defecating on her own muumuu was too awful for my pre-pubescent brain to handle. In that moment, I vowed that I would die the day after my 70th birthday. Or even sooner, if possible. I would never be found covered in my own shit and lying broken on the floor, because I simply wouldn’t live that long. I would die while I still had dignity and presence of mind. Hopefully I would still have my figure too.

And so, when my time came, I said “Yes!” to cigarettes. I said yes to alcohol and pot and pills and anything else that crossed my path. I still work out and eat properly and moisturise and sleep 8 hours every night, because I am vain, but I’m not going to make any effort to extend my life beyond the ability to control my own bladder. If being healthy means dying in a puddle of my own excrement with broken hips, then Harold can eat my arse.

Editor’s note: Any teachers or parents who are interested in having Annik speak at their children’s schools can send an expression of interest via email to education [at] annikskelton.com

I had just turned nineteen when a routine visit to the dentist suddenly took a nasty turn….

“Look at those wizzies!” Fred said, fingering my gums. “We need to take those babies out asap!”

“Are you sure?” I asked, feeling sick.

“Of course I’m sure,” Fred said, offended. “I’ve been a dentist for twenty goddamn years. Don’t worry, they’ll put you under before they get started.”

I relaxed immediately. Several painful things had happened to me under local anesthetic, so I was apprehensive of staying awake during any sort of medical procedure and wanted to be put under for most things, including having my legs waxed. However, up until now, nobody had ever offered me a general anesthetic, so I felt very excited. Furthermore, I would likely be prescribed some sweet pain killers to cope with the post-op agony. My love affair with pharmaceuticals stretched back to infancy, and I had developed quite a strong tolerance for most over-the-counter medications by the time I reached adolescence. An opportunity to legitimately obtain some harder gear was way too good to pass up.

“Will there be panadeine forte or similar involved in this?” I asked Fred, trying to keep my voice casual.

“Hell yes,” he replied. “Do you have any idea how deep your wisdom teeth grow?”

I waved him away and sat back in the chair, already planning how this tooth extraction surgery would pan out. I would get to go to hospital for the first time ever, and the novelty of this would be so intense that it would outweigh any negative aspects of having my teeth wrenched from my head. After the operation, I would stay at my parents’ house, where I would lie on the lounge and watch Dawson’s Creek for a week. Of course, this didn’t differ very much at all from my regular life, except that now I would be doing it while I was fucked up on codeine. Further, I would have my mother and father around to wait on me. It would be like a holiday that didn’t cost any money, just teeth.

The big day arrived and my mother drove me to the hospital in the morning. After I registered with reception, I was taken into a consultation room and instructed to remove all my jewellery and hair accessories.

“I’m having my mouth operated on, not my pony tail,” I told the nurse.

“This is standard procedure,” she replied defensively. “Now, how much do you weigh?”

“That’s a little personal,” I protested.

“We need to know your weight in order to figure out how much anesthetic to give you,” she explained.

“Oh. In that case, put me down for 80kg.”

After I left the consultation room, I was shown into a pre-op area and given a gown to change into. My mother paced around the room, looking anxious.

“Don’t worry, Mum,” I told her, “I’ll be fine!”

“Oh it’s not that,” she said. “I’ve asked your father to tape A Country Practice and I’m worried he won’t remember.”

After I undressed, I was put on a bed and wheeled to the operating theatre. Once there, a man inserted an IV into my arm, smiled, and told me to count backwards from ten. “Ten…” I said, and promptly passed out.

When I came to, I was in a room with several other girls lying in beds. I panicked straight away. Was this an abortion clinic? Had I just gotten breast implants? Been hit by a bus? Donated an organ? I flagged a nurse and grabbed her arm when she came to my bed. She patted my hand reassuringly and adjusted my gown, which had slipped down to my belly button. I hadn’t even noticed, I was so out of it.

I woke up again about half an hour later. This time, my mother was sitting next to me. “Are you ready yet?” she asked. “I’ve been here all freaking day, let’s hit the road.”

When we got home, I strapped a pack of ice around my jaw. Then I took four panadeine forte and got into bed. I woke up at 3pm the next day and prepared to move to the lounge. But here, my holiday began to divert from the original plan. Codeine made me simple-minded and unable to follow the swift, verbose dialogue of Dawson’s Creek. I kept falling asleep during each episode and waking up confused. And despite using the ice pack, after 24 hours, my jaw had swelled incredibly and my head resembled a peanut. My plans to recover glamorously, lying on the couch and entertaining visitors while my parents fetched me ice cream, had been thwarted by the fact that I was too embarrassed to let anybody see me.  My brother came home from work and sat on the coffee table, studying me. “You kind of look like you have Down’s syndrome,” he said. “Except uglier.”

“Fuck you,” I replied, too drugged up to think of any other response.

“I’m going to get my camera!” he said and went to his room.

I took two more panadeine forte and sank into the couch cushions, mentally willing my jaw to shrink.

The swelling did go down eventually, but it took exactly one week. One horribly long week of avoiding mirrors and keeping the blinds closed. Even after the pain in my jaw subsided, I couldn’t leave the house because I now had a deformed head. My brother invited his friends over to show them how ugly I had become. The ironing man looked at me sympathetically, the way one looks at a failed suicide who has inflicted hideous scars on themself but somehow scraped together the will to live, even with a face like a dropped pie. However, I was nowhere near that stoic. I wrapped big scarves around my face, even when I was home alone. And I flat-out refused to move back to my share house until my head had regained its normal shape. I realised that my face was the most important thing in the world to me, and I made a lifelong commitment to protect it. I would wear helmets and mouth guards and goggles and hats and sunscreen forever, because I knew I would never have the strength of character required to live with a crooked nose or a third degree facial burn. Oh I was born with blemishes like everyone else, but I was blessed with imperfections that I could mostly hide with clothing, make up, and lies. The Week of Ugly made me realise how lucky I was. Sure, I might have been dealt short-sightedness, scoliosis and terrible migraines, but at least I didn’t have a head shaped like a fucking peanut.

Wanker at party: Hey She-Skelton, you look different tonight.

Me: I’m not wearing make up. I just came from the gym.

WAP: Oh.

Me: Yeah.

WAP: Oh no, it’s not bad. I mean, you don’t look totally ugly.

Me: Just get me a beer.

WAP: Oh, okay.

I am one of those people for whom massage is useless. Despite going to great lengths to appear laidback and easygoing, underneath I am in a state of constant agitation. I am always stressed about work, money, the weather, my mother, the size of the gap between my thighs, being a shitty friend, and the state of my love life. On holidays, I worry about the absences: the emails I’m not receiving, the work-outs I’m not fulfilling, the people I’m not spending time with, the dollars I’m not saving. The last time I felt truly relaxed was on a weekend trip to Forster in September 2008, after I smoked so much pot that I couldn’t figure out how to climb a set of stairs.

So it was basically a waste for me to be spending 3 hours in a day spa at an island resort off Penang. But I went anyway, because I was on holidays and there was little else to do. As a young Malaysian girl rubbed exfoliating scrub into me, I thought, does she hate this? Maybe she had kids or ailing relatives, and instead of staying home taking care of them, she was stuck rubbing oil onto soft white people for $4 an hour. If she was anything like me, this would make her bitter and overly critical. She would sniff at my uneven tan and scoff at my undefined arms. She would snicker at the disposable day spa underpants cutting into my well-fed western flesh. She would shake her head at the scars on my leg (a sure symbol of poor-little-rich-white-girl syndrome.) She would hate me, and every minute she had to touch me would be torture.

I began to wish that the massage girl was older. I wished she was taller, more Asian, and spoke no English. I wished she was a large, elderly African gay man.  I wished she was anything that would make her less like me; less likely to judge everything before her down to each individual hair follicle.

I worried that the exfoliating procedure was chaffing her hands. Perhaps she had a paper cut that needed to be kept clean, and all this day spa gunk was preventing her wound from healing. Maybe she’d pulled a muscle in her back, and climbing onto the table to crawl over me was painful for her.

I was getting hot under my towel, despite being nearly naked beneath it. I could feel the beginning of a headache behind my eyes. I wanted a glass of water. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to go back to my room and sit alone under the air-conditioning and watch the cooking channel, even though I had no intention of ever cooking anything in life. I wanted to check my phone to see whether my friend Kahlee had texted me. I’ve known Kahlee for 4 years, and I am used to emailing her ten times a day to update her, in immense detail, on everything that has occured within the last hour. If I do not document my life in mundane emails to Kahlee, it has not transpired.

By then, the massage had become mentally excruciating. I should have been enjoying this luxurious treatment; basking in the extravagance of it and wishing it would never end. Instead, I was considering pushing the girl away, explaining, “I’m sorry but I’m nuts and I can’t lie here for 3 hours listening to my brain,” and leaving the spa.

But then, just as I was trying to figure out how to communicate my sentiments in Engrish, the girl interrupted my thoughts by saying, “Miss, may I scrub your breasts?”

I had 2 seconds to think about this. I needed 3 more.

“I’m sorry – what?”

“Miss, may I scrub your breasts?”

“Ohh, of course,” I said graciously, as though she had asked to borrow a light.

And then, as the impoverished Malaysian woman exfoliated my nipples, my brain magically switched off. I had landed myself in a situation so awkward, so culturally imbalanced, so close to paying an Asian girl to perform sexual favours, that my mind was simply unable to worry about anything else. I relaxed.

I was reading my friend Helen’s Live Journal when I came across the following paragraphs:

We grabbed a beer and headed for the front bar. I accidentally caught the eye of someone sitting next to the door… As I walked past he ducked his head and gave this long, breathy snort, before bursting into laughter and going, ‘FAT chance.’

What I never understand about these situations is that your attacker doesn’t ever tell you anything you don’t already KNOW. Unattractive people are more than aware of their unattractiveness, always. We carry it with us daily, and the weight of it makes us grunt. Every time we look in the mirror – hello, horror. Every time we get caught unawares on camera – god forbid, put that red-herring-cross-Appaloosa face away. So yeah, we know about it. Why the need to verbally reinforce? Who is born with such cruelty in their genes?

I’ve never actually met Helen, but I can tell from my Facebook stalking that she is one of those beautifully quirky, colourful, witty, clever people you rarely come across. To imagine somebody pissing on her birthday cake over something so stupid as how she looks really hacks me off. And it breaks my heart a little too, because I know that no matter how brazen and confident you are, a dumb passing comment from some random douchebag can reduce the toughest of us to a self-loathing mess.

For me, it’s less about my face and more about the size of my arse. As an adult, I’ve weighed 70kg and I’ve weighed 45kg at different points in time (I’m 5’6″.) I wasn’t particularly well in either of those situations, but I’ve never gotten more (positive) attention in my life than when I resembled a broomstick. Hell, even at 60kg, I was rarely given a second glance. I was referred to as “the fat one.” Guys would approach my friends in bars and say, “Hey, gorgeous,” then turn to me and say, “Hey not-so-gorgeous.” And when I had the guts to wear a singlet that said “UGLY” one night, a girl pointed me out to her friends and shouted “Yeah, she is ugly!” All of these incidents were unprovoked, unless you count the shape of my body or the arrangement of my facial features as an invitation for rebuke. Apparently, I was so hideous on those occasions that complete strangers felt the need to comment. And not in private either – they commented right to my ugly face.

Despite all this, I think I’ve managed to come out the other side with a pretty healthy self esteem. I’m no supermodel, but I’m not bad looking either. As long as I stay below a size 10 (the upper limit of the “acceptable weight range” of most guys I date) I think I look reasonable. If I tell this to people though, there is guffawing and rolling of eyes. Girls are not supposed to think they’re pretty. We are supposed to be insecure to the point of obsession. Pout in front of the mirror and squeeze at the fat on our arms and bellies. Shove our fingers down our throats and lose sleep over the wrinkles around our eyes. When somebody compliments you on your appearance, deny it! Don’t say thank you or actually agree with them. Good god, the scandal.

Sometimes little pokes and prods have the desired effect. An overweight person might use their unflattering nicknames to fuel their fire at the gym. Another person wearing tights as pants might need to catch a few disapproving glances before they figure out what they’re doing wrong. But simply telling somebody they’re ugly isn’t exactly constructive. What reaction do these people expect? “Oh really? Shit, thanks for letting me know. I’ll get a new face asap.”

So are people randomly insulting girls in order to make sure we don’t get too sure of ourselves? Modesty is becoming in a woman, so make sure she damn well knows she’s not hot enough? Or is it the old “I make fun of the other kids to make myself feel better” syndrome? Cutting down everyone around you to make yourself taller?

Is consumerism to blame? Entire industries are built on our insecurities: weight loss products, cosmetics, plastic surgery, fake tanning, etc. Every day, the TV and magazines tell us that we’re ugly and overweight, so what’s wrong with telling each other the same thing? Have we been desensitised to our own cruelties?

Personally, I blame fairy tales. The good guys were always hot, and the bad guys were butt ugly. Snow White was a babe, while Rumpelstiltskin was a hideous dwarf. From the day we’re born, there’s a very strong reinforcement that people who look nice are usually nice, and people who look dodgy are usually dodgy. In some cases, this is true, but not always.

Maybe when we tell our kids not to discriminate against people who are black or homosexual or female, we should also tell them not to discriminate against those who have been dealt a dose of acne or a bad nose.

And maybe next time you see someone who you think could use some improvement, you should shut the fuck up.