Have you ever seen a cygnet? A cygnet is a baby swan. And they are super cute. And yet, when we talk of people who blossom into a more physically beautiful being than one may have imagined, we say that they were an “ugly duckling”, based on the tale by that name created by Hans Christian Anderson.

I find it hard to imagine that someone reading this hasn’t heard of this story. But, in the off chance that you haven’t, the story is basically about a swan whose egg falls in with some duck eggs. And when the egg hatches, all the little ducks freak out because this one duck, which is actually a swan, doesn’t look like the others. So they do what any anthropomorphized duck would do, they start seeing the worst in the little cygnet. There’s no sense of wonder or compassion. There’s only, “You don’t look…