ME, MY SELFIE, I!

After being cruelly trolled, Melissa decided to take a selfie a day for a year and along the way she has discovered herself

- LINDSAY DE FREITAS

SHE’S looked different all her life so she’d become used to being trolled on the internet and called names like “blobfish” and “whale”.

But one day things went too far.

Melissa Blake, an American journalist who was born with a rare bone and muscular disorder called Freeman-Sheldon syndrome, wrote an essay criticizing US President Donald Trump and a Trump-supporting YouTuber who responded by sharing her photo.

Soon hundreds of people weighed in, mocking her appearance.

Melissa, whose condition results in skeletal malformations, head, and facial abnormalities, and restricted limb movement, usually laughs off the taunts of strangers.

“But there was one comment I just couldn’t shake,” the 39-year-old says. One user said she was “too ugly” to post photos of herself – and the more she thought about it, the more she knew she wanted to respond in some way. And so, rather than step back from social media, she decided to take on the trolls.

“People said I should be banned from posting photos of myself because I’m too ugly,” she tweeted last September.

“So, I’d just like to commemorate the occasion with these three selfies.”

Her post went viral and thousands of people praised her for hitting back. Inspired, she took things a powerful step further.

For the next 366 days, she posted a picture a day, sharing serious, silly and playful selfies with the hashtag MyBestSelfie, all of which truly reflected her personality, she says. Slowly, Melissa’s act of defiance turned into a journey of self-discovery and self-love and now, just over a year later, she’s stronger than ever.