Neuroses and nose jobs, a lifestyle blog

There’s no easy way to slide into talking about a nose job with your parents. I tried anyways. Sitting on a bench on an street corner in Brooklyn, surrounded by plants because it was a plant store’s bench, I began with the pain I’d woken up to in my feet yesterday.

It was out of nowhere, I said, because it was. If it was still this bad tomorrow I guess I’d find a doctor to go to, also true. And then, on the subject of things wrong, I said with a forced dispassionate casualness that I was going to find a plastic surgeon to do a rhinoplasty consultation, because I’m unhappy with the way I look, and I’ve been unhappy for years, and there’s no reason to live with something like this if it can be fixed.

“I was going to find,” I said, not I wanted to. If there was any question about me doing it or emotion in my voice they’d push back, like they’ve always pushed back. A repeated no, are you sure? You’re fine. Give it time. I am sure, and I’ve given it time, and I’ve seen holiday card after Snapstory after mirrored backsplash of someone who doesn’t match up to how I see myself. Don’t wanna live like this; not going to live like this.

Yet, fear. The searching seeking questions I want to ask other people even though I know that’s the wrong thing to do, that I don’t ask other people not because it’s the wrong thing to do but because I don’t want to hear their answer. Do you think I need a nose job, I want to text my best friend. Do you think I’m pretty, no paramours to ask at the moment so instead I pose the question to the past. Vadim, that asshole, lying in bed, “you know you’re pretty.” He said he wanted to take a photo so I’d see it but I said no, definitely not, that would be the worst thing you could do. My eyebrows were the thing he’d change, he said.

Count ’em up, every nice thing anyone’s ever said about you, Pieter Joshua your aunt’s friend on the beach that girl on the teen trip in Fiji in the candlelight so only half counts that’s a very flattering light Christabel secondhand from someone else the way Will looked at you that morning Lawrence looking down at you in his lap. A salesperson at Nars two years ago who did the makeup for a magazine editor’s wedding in Italy. A salesperson at Sephora. A stranger at a bar, a stranger from an app at a bar. Leo, over Snapchat. An assistant at Allure, offhand, like it was assumed common knowledge, so that counts more. Never your mother, who would lie to you.

And I know caring about this is wrong — I know it’s a slippery slope and if you base your self-worth off others you’re in the shit. I know. But still I search back for evidence that the person I think I am matches up to the person I am, when the person in photos always leaves me wondering. Holding up compliments to the light, comparing them to the collective of photos gone in the ether untagged. Do I need this? Will this mess up whatever I have going, in life if not in photos? I hate the way my smile makes my nose spread in photos. Smile, spread, untag. The last photo of me smiling is from a year ago today, and I hate it. I want to untag.

Thomas W. Loeb, M.D., P.C., world renowned plastic surgeon in italics. I scheduled a consultation and it was crazy how normal it felt — 212.327.3700, you can be different. Every single one of his before and afters doesn’t just look different, though, like a lot of other surgeons’ do. With those you hope it was what the person wanted, fixing the flaws they saw even if it’s just different, no better, no worse to the rest of us. Every single one of his admittedly self-published before and afters looks objectively more attractive, which is what I want. And I know “objectively more attractive” doesn’t exist, I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder and everyone’s beautiful in their own way. I’ve heard all of these messages but it’s like they’ve only absorbed into the topsoil, and my deep earth is still knotty with the want to be pleasing beyond a shadow of a doubt. Which is bad. I know. But I want to be better, I want to look like myself, that self, I want to smile in photos and not sink with dread when a little red notification box pops up.