I have a life, only sometimes it doesn’t feel like I’m the right size for my own skin. Am I the only one not secure in the role of being myself? It’s not something you can just bring up, like asking what you’re wearing to the party on Saturday. I could just imagine asking Jen.
“Uh, nooo,” she’d say, like I’d completely lost it. Why should she feel that way? She’s not crazed about how she looks.
So I don’t sit on my bed and take magazines quizzes like the ones that ask: “Do You Make the Grade? Find Out How Much You Love Yourself.” I know how they would come out.
You’re not happy with the way you are …
You’re overly concerned with how other people see you …
What’s worse is that I’m haunted by stupid remarks that people make. “Hey nose,” Kirk called out to me one day on the way to the cafeteria.
And that was kind—for him.
My mom opened the door the last time I took one of those quizzes and I slammed the magazine down.
Sometimes I think my mom should have stayed with acting because her dramatic expressions tell you exactly what she’s thinking. Her blue eyes narrowed slightly so that I could see creases between her eyebrows. She pushed her dark, shoulder length hair away from her face and studied me.
“It’s a stupid self-assessment quiz, okay?” I held it out to her briefly.
Her face relaxed. “I wouldn’t read too much into a psychological test in a teen magazine.” She sat on the edge of the bed and I stared at the antique gold locket around her neck. My dad bought it for her on their tenth anniversary.
“Then again if you’re unhappy, maybe it would help to talk to someone.”
“Someone?”
“A shrink.” She shrugged. “Just an idea.”
Or a surgeon.
You can’t just start talking to my parents about important things. You have to pave the way slowly because everything they do takes forever.
New job for my dad: two years and a bajillion phone calls, emails, letters, and lunches later.
Search for new couch: one year and about eighty gallons of gas to visit every furniture showroom.
New laptop for me: three months, but only because there was a sale.
“I’ll think about it.”
She nodded and stood, picking up a single shoe from the floor and hanging it on the shoe rack in my closet. She closed the door behind her on her way out.
The truth is that the way I see myself would change completely if I had my nose done. Then if I was taking a quiz about myself, everything would be yes, instead of no.
“Do you see yourself as beautiful?”
Or, more importantly, “do you see yourself as worthy of someone’s love?”
It’s nothing a shrink could fix. They’re always asking how you feel, at least according to Jen and a show I watched on TV about a therapist and his patients. They expect you to talk and think about everything, even if you don’t want to, and all they do is sit there and wait and make you feel dumb and self-conscious. My problem is obvious. A nose. It’s there. You can’t deny it, so what is there to discuss?
Jen went to a shrink after her favorite aunt died unexpectedly, and she ended up unhappier.
“You spend almost an hour unloading and then they give you this blank stare and say, ‘So how do you really feel?’” she said. “Or worse, ‘I’m sorry, our time is up. Let’s continue next time.’ That makes you doubly depressed because the last thing you want when you’re talking about your loser life is to stop in the middle and wait a whole week to start talking about it again.”
Surgery is faster. Therapy with a knife.
I hit Google and typed the ugliest word in the English language into the search box: rhinoplasty.
Translation: nose job.
Somewhere in the middle of the listings I came upon a website called The Swan. It includes bulletin boards about beauty and plastic surgery. People leave comments, but they also post pre- and post-op pictures and ask for feedback. They bitch about procedures and doctors, ask for recommendations of surgeons in their area, or just vent about things they need to get off their chests.
Click. I’m anonymous. I decided to call myself A.
So I began.
A: I’m desperate to get my nose done. No one I know needs the surgery so I feel dumb talking to anyone else about it. If anyone had any idea what I was obsessed with 24/7, they’d think I was a freak, you know?
When I checked back, I saw that a girl had welcomed me to the site, telling me “not to feel like a freak.”
“Everyone thinks they’re the only one who obsesses about their nose or whatever else,” she said. “So welcome to the club.”
Other posts were responding to someone trying to decide which of the three LA doctors she’d seen to go with. Someone else talked about how her nose was so swollen she couldn’t tell how much the surgery helped. As I was about to close the screen, someone named Melanie answered me.
Melanie: A, I’m consumed with my nose too. Every time I look in the mirror—and I look in every mirror, even my reflection in store windows!—I’m reminded how much I hate the way I look.
I went to get a snack, and when I came back, there was a comment from another girl.
Katrina: Mel and A, I know how you both feel. I’m obsessed, 24/7.
Melanie: No one except my mom and my boyfriend know how much I hate my nose.
Katrina: I haven’t told anyone at all.
A: It’s just not the kind of thing you feel safe bringing up because if someone didn’t think about it before, they’ll never not think of it after you talk about it.
Melanie: My mom took me to a plastic surgeon when I was ten, but he told me it was too early to do it.
For the next few days, I went back to the site every night after dinner. It started to feel like a private universe where I could finally open up. Mel was always there. Katrina less so, but once the three of us connected, we had a routine—eight o’clock weekday nights, except for Tuesdays when Katrina does volunteer work.
Katrina: Have any of you seen a surgeon recently?
A: No, and my parents have no idea how much I think about doing my nose. More than anything, I wish I could go to one of those free consultations because then, at least, I’d find out what could be done.
Melanie: I’m sure whatever you look like, they can help you. Do you spend hours looking at all the before-and-after pictures on the plastic surgery websites like I do? Can you believe the difference an hour of surgery can make? What did people do before surgery? And before the Net? LOL! Who did they talk to about all this stuff?
Katrina: Can’t imagine. Maybe all their secrets went into their diaries.
A: LOL! I’d be afraid someone would find mine. How old are you guys?
Melanie: 16.
A: 15.
Katrina: I’m 15 too.
For the first time in my life I was spilling all my feelings to faceless people in the virtual universe who got me better than anyone I know in real life. How weird is that? Out of the blue, I was flooded with relief. It was all out there, not locked in my head anymore. There were other people who felt the same way I did. I wasn’t a total freak.
Now, after only a few weeks, our lives feel bound together.
One thing we all agree on: “You can’t escape the mirrors.”
Sometimes I laugh because a lot of what we talk about sounds like it’s off someone’s blog.
Melanie: Did you ever notice how different lights in dressing rooms—neon (deadly) or incandescent—can totally change the way you see yourself?
Katrina: I hate to go to the hair salon because a light just above the chair spotlights my nose. It makes me look totally gross.
Katrina is from a woodsy New Jersey town I never heard of where there are supposed to be black bears. Mel, as she calls herself, lives in Westport, Connecticut, near the water. Unlike my parents, Mel’s sound totally cool.
Melanie: They think if I can fix my nose and look a hundred times better, why not? Plastic surgery isn’t a big deal for them. You have a problem, you take care of it.
But that doesn’t settle it for her. She has to deal with Mark, “the boyfriend.”
Melanie: I’ve been going out with him for almost a year, and he doesn’t want me to do it.
A: Why not?
Melanie: His older brother had surgery for a burst appendix and nearly died, so now he can’t imagine why anyone would go near a hospital if they didn’t have to. Not only that, but he likes the way I look. Doesn’t care about the bump—he doesn’t want me to look like everybody else.
A: What are you going to do?
Melanie: Do not know.
Katrina doesn’t have a bump, “just a crooked nose.” She says she has a black belt in tae kwon do, a super-fit body, and long, blond “boy magnet” hair, as Mel calls it.
Katrina: Still, whenever I look in the mirror, I hate what I see.
Mel: Hate, that’s the operative word here.
A: Amen.