Riya's Post

In 2014, someone looked at me and casually said my upper lip looked like a moustache. A small sentence, tossed like lint, yet it lodged itself deep. I let it sink in. I deleted photographs from my public social media. I erased evidence. I allowed one external voice to overwrite my own sight, to annotate my face with ridicule. Today, I went back to those pictures. What I found startled me. There was no flaw waiting to be discovered, no hidden embarrassment I had heroically concealed. There was just a young woman in her early twenties, looking exactly as a woman of that age looks. Normal. Unremarkable in the most human way. Alive. What changed was not my face. What changed was authority. Back then, I handed it away. I let someone else narrate my body in a language of contempt, and I believed it without cross-examination. Looking now, I see how quietly violence works. Not with blows, but with suggestions. Not with certainty, but with doubt. The younger woman in those photographs did nothing wrong. She only trusted the wrong mirror.

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This post was published on 20th January, 2026 by Riya on her Instagram handle "@magical_._muggle (Dr. Riya Dutta)". Riya has total 1.6K followers on Instagram and has a total of 871 post.This post has received 56 Likes which are lower than the average likes that Riya gets. Riya receives an average engagement rate of 5.04% per post on Instagram. This post has received 2 comments which are lower than the average comments that Riya gets. Overall the engagement rate for this post was lower than the average for the profile.