Ugly Duckling

From Menletter May 2007

By Tim Baehr

In Hans Christian Andersen's tale, a duck hatches her eggs and discovers that one of her ducklings is large, gray, clumsy, and ugly. The barnyard animals harass the poor Ugly Duckling until he leaves and becomes a wanderer in the countryside. He survives, but just barely, and a year later approaches a group of beautiful swans swimming in a pond. Expecting to be ostracized anew, he is surprised to find that the swans accept him as one of their own. He looks at his reflection in the water and discovers that he, too, is a beautiful swan.

The story is ostensibly about inner beauty and its importance over physical beauty. I think there's more. If the Ugly Duckling had been hatched by a swan, he would have been beautiful to his cohorts. Also, it would be a mistake to think that the Ugly Duckling spent a year in exile, self-identified as a duck, and then somehow just turned magically into a swan.

The people I know who started out in life as Ugly Ducklings - and I know quite a few - were always swans, inside and outside. The fact that they didn't fit into their surroundings during a part of their lives made their growing up difficult and sometimes painful. And I can imagine some people continuing their Ugly Duckling-hood right on into adult life - never quite fitting in, being the butts of jokes and ridicule, not quite believing in their inner swan.

Two good things can happen to an Ugly Duckling. As in the tale, the Ugly Ducking can develop, unseen by unfriendly eyes, into a swan. We can hope that this has happened, or will happen, to all the Ugly Ducklings in our lives. But another thing may be just as important. Sometimes someone - a teacher, a parent, a mentor, a best friend - will see only the swan-in-the-making and treat the Ugly Duckling not as ugly or a duckling but as himself.

Ugly Ducklings fortunate enough to have one or both of these experiences often emerge not only as beautiful "swans," but also as human beings with a deep sense of compassion. They've known the adversity that can arise out of being different, and they seem to have a sixth sense for finding fellow swans among the Ugly Ducklings of the world.