In real life, being the ugly friend in a gaggle of gorgeous girlfriends can sometimes feel like you’re supporting cast in someone else’s story. That feeling is reinforced when you notice, as you’re walking down the street, that most people’s eyes, like a rom com camera, slide right off you and onto your beautiful friends. It’s a deeply unpleasant, genuinely pernicious feeling.

It creates competition, and resentment, and jealousy, as corrosive to friendship as salt water air on a scratched up car. It makes you bad at friendship, less able to empathize with the people you’re supposed to be supporting: “How can she complain about whatever problem I’m supposed to be helping her solve right now, doesn’t she know how lucky she is to look like that?”

You head knows that being beautiful doesn’t guarantee a care-free life. Your head knows that beautiful people have their own beautiful person-specific problems to deal with. Your head definitely knows that being physically attractive isn’t the most important thing in the world. Better to cultivate your mind, your heart, your wit. The competitive, resentful, jealous part of you, living in the foetid, hidden swamps of your personality doesn’t give a crap about that inner beauty shit.

The swamps are ugly, and if you’re not careful, you fall into them and get stuck there. The best you can do, to be the best friend you can be, especially to the best-looking people, is to drain the swamps as much and as often as you can. And of course, to remind yourself that while you’re busy envying the butterflies, there’s someone else who, when you walk in the room, suddenly feels like a moth.