The Ugly Duckling and Blindness
My whole life I felt like an ugly duckling. I was made fun of in school, I was tormented, and my nickname was chinny. I had the blessing of being born with a massive underbite that was to be the bane of my existence until my mid-twenties. Every time I looked in the mirror, I hated myself.
Every time someone made fun of me, I loathed myself a little bit more.
Despite a half-assed attempt at modeling in my late teens (an obvious attempt to try to prove I was beautiful by using my body), I could never fully come to terms with how I looked. All I could see in myself was my ugly face. My uncle, an orthodontist, advised my parents that it would need to be fixed, but that I’d have to grow into it first.
My parents felt bad, and they wanted me to have braces, but my uncle was adamant that I would not fully grow into my bone structure until after I was 20, which meant that I had to learn to live with it. I would have to be one of those people who had braces after I was fully developed.
After Dad died, I stopped caring for a while. Drugs helped with that, and I avoided the mirror.
But deep down inside of me, I hated myself.
I felt ugly and ridiculed. I could never quite move past it. To top it all off, I also had coke bottle glasses at the time. I was deemed legally blind in my left eye when I was in kindergarten and grew up wearing godawful pink coke bottle glasses, with a massive underbite.
It’s no wonder I was made fun of—I don’t blame them.
By the time I was 19, I was tired of it. I broke down. My mom and I had a deep, heart-to-heart conversation, and I was adamant that if something wasn’t done to fix this ugliness that I carried within me, I wasn’t ever going to be happy. I put so much emphasis on how I looked, and I made it everything.
I felt like it was ruining my life.
At family get-togethers, I would sit quietly in the corner, with my hand over my chin. I was shy, lacked confidence, and was mortified if anyone actually asked me a question. I didn’t know how to function in society, and I knew, deep down, that I wasn’t embracing who I really was, all because I didn’t like how I looked. It had created a massive lack of confidence within me, so I asked my mom for help.
We began with Lasik eye surgery. At the time, this type of surgery was relatively new and very expensive. We both agreed that when it came to my eyes, the money was well spent, as I didn’t want to end up blind. We found the best eye surgeon money could buy and booked the appointment.
The eye surgery was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. As they lay you on the table below the lasers, they let you know that you’re going to be awake for the entire procedure and that you’ll be tied to the table so you can’t move. As the laser moves toward your eye, they ask you to breathe through it, as the panic settles into your body. And then, you witness yourself going blind as they laser off the top portion of your eyeball and flip it back to do the actual surgery.
By the time they finished the second eye and released me from the table, my body was in complete shock.
I was shaking, and freezing.
They were prepared for it, as they had lazy boy chairs set up with heated blankets and lots of water and tea to drink. As I settled into the chair, they strapped little drink cups over my eyes so that I couldn’t rub my eyes. I was blind for three days.
It was entirely worth the effort because when my vision did return, it was almost perfect. I have never had to put on a pair of glasses since. Night driving isn’t great, but it’s better than having to wear coke bottle glasses and be blind.