"You Can Hide It With A Scarf"

On Wednesday I posted my 11week post-op update, but I left out a detail of that day that I have been thinking about a lot since. I talked to some friends in my capstone class tonight and I think its something that needs to be included in this blog. Fair warning though: I'm about to get real deep into the emotional shit right now.

We are starting a new project in my introduction to painting class this week: a self-portrait. This is already a touchy subject for me as I am sure you can imagine considering the what the surgery was for. Well, we were told to bring in a picture of ourselves that we can paint. I was the only one who remembered to bring one in. Well, as we begin talking about starting the process of painting a self-portrait, the professor hands out a packet on how to draw faces and the "rules of symmetry". At this point my anxiety level starts building up, I can feel my heart racing, and a sense of doom washed over me and the professor starts talking about these rules.

Just as a side note, I really like this professor, she has made this 8:00am painting class really interesting and I am actually enjoying it, but that day she really fucked up. The professor talks about how eyes are always the length of one eye apart, the face always takes up 1/3 of the head and so on. She said "I've never come across anyone who these rules didn't apply to, and I would be shocked if I met someone who did". Well rules always have exceptions and that exception is me. I'm sitting there listening to this and trying to hold it together because this lecture is really bringing up some major emotional baggage for me, when the professor starts explaining drawing faces and making sure we have shadows. She picked up my picture and points out the shadows and how we would paint the different values. Then she goes back to talking about the "rules" and says "sometimes there are distortions...here is a good example" picks up my picture (which I took literally 12 hours earlier) and points out my chin in relation to my nose. I didn't get to hear what she said about this distortion because I left the room to go ride out a panic attack in the bathroom.

After pulling it together enough to go back to class I decided I needed to talk to the teacher about what was going on because painting a self-portrait is going to be a struggle. I went up to her after class and explained, as best I could even though I was crying again and trying not to hyperventilate, that the surgery I told her about at the beginning of the semester was to correct a bone deformity that caused facial asymmetry and doing this self-portrait might be overwhelming sometimes so please just bear with me if I need to take a break or start crying in class again. I showed her the before picture hoping that would add to the significance of having to do a painting of myself.

She said "Well you know you can use any picture you want, you could hide it with a hat or a scarf" and "you were a beautiful girl then and you are now". 

I need to talk about that for a minute. While I'm sure she meant it to be supportive and that she didn't want me to have to paint something that would make me upset, she clearly misunderstood why it upset me.

My FACE, the first thing you see when you meet new people, look in the mirror, and the thing that literally identifies a person, was crooked and was only going to become more and more crooked as I got older. There was always this level of not knowing what my "real" face would have been if I hadn't been born with this mutation. And it defined my entire life from the moment the first orthodontist pointed it out. It decided how I did my hair, what clothes I bought, how I posed in pictures, how I socialized, how I ate, how I talked, everything. In a way, it stole an identity I could have had. One I'm reclaiming now.

Everyone has insecurities, thats just part of growing up, but, by adulthood most people learn to address their insecurities in a way that makes them feel more secure. Acne, for example, can be covered with make-up, changed by eating healthier, using face wash regularly and treated with certain medications. No amount of make-up or soap or prescriptions would make my jaw stop growing in the wrong direction or change my genetic make-up so one random gene wasn't mutated.

I have mentioned a few times that I was insecure about my chin and my jaw before the surgery and I have heard the "you were always beautiful" line a bunch of times from a lot of people and don't get me wrong, I appreciate the compliment and the amount of support I have gotten through this process is absolutely incredible and it means so much to me...

But, I wasn't insecure because I perceived my chin and my jaw as something that made me ugly; I didn't like it, I desperately wished it would magically go away but it was never a question of beauty. Sometimes when someone tells me "you were beautiful then and you still are" it can be a little invalidating, like this was something that could be a hashtag on twitter #embraceyourface or some bullshit. No. This isn't something to embrace or that the media has an unreasonable standard of beauty for. Facial symmetry is literally the norm; people of all genders, races and socioeconomic status are usually born with all their features in the position they will remain in forever. But not those of us who have skeletal malocclusions.

It can be isolating to look around you and know that the person sitting across the room from you will never have to think about the position of their chin. But thats why I'm posting this. Finding the other blogs from people who needed to have double jaw surgery was like finally finding people who could relate to me, yet, none of them ever addressed this part of the experience and its important.

I couldn't be more thankful or blessed that the nightmare is over and I am well on my way to a full recovery. Maybe I'm just being an emotional art therapy major who is super touchy feely about this stuff but if there is a chance that someone else will read this and feel validated that there is at least one person who understands then this blog has done it's job.

As for my self portrait, I have spent the last however many years of my life hiding and trying to be invisible, but I don't feel like I need to do that anymore. So no professor, I will not be hiding my jaw with hat or a scarf and thats still new for me so I don't know exactly what that means yet. I hope you don't mind that I modified the "rules" for my senior exhibition project though, after all, rules are made to be broken.

 Read this article if you are interested in how major changes in appearance can affect your identity.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/can-drastically-changing-your-face-give-you-an-ide?utm_term=.bylYGa3Bm