Hey Ugly, Your Nose is Big and You’re Disgusting!

Elementary school, northern New Jersey, where everyone knows everyone and the same small group of kids follow you from first grade to senior year. It was very early on that a boy in my class, I’ll call him R for short, told me I was ugly not just ugly but super ugly. I went home and cried, as any emotional and sensitive child would do.

There were others who teased me and did the whole name calling thing but for some reason, it was his words that really stung. Maybe because it wasn’t normal childhood teasing but because the words were mean. Brutal, even.

You are so ugly that your parents made you go to the back of the house before you can go inside!

Why is your hair frizzy? Are you African?

Why are your lips so big?

Why is your nose so big?

Hey, big nose!

You’re so skinny, whats wrong with you?

Flat as a board! Where are your boobs?

What’s wrong with your nose?

Even your parents think you’re ugly!

This went on and on and on. I thought about dying… if I was so ugly and disgusting, why had I even been born? I struggled with depression and low self esteem for years, not all R’s fault of course.

Many years later I casually mentioned how I was teased to a close friend with whom I’d grown up and she immediately answered, “Oh yeah, R was really mean to you.”

In high school, I’d see him coming down the hall and I’d avert my gaze. If I was in a class with him or the guy I had a crush on, I’d sit with my hand over my face. When we got to pick our seats, I sat in the very back corner where I kept my face down or my hair pulled around my face so no one could see me. If I couldn’t melt into a puddle then at least I wanted to hide. I’d pray that the teacher wouldn’t call on me because I didn’t want people turning in their seats to look at me.

I went home and cried so many times that looking in the mirror afterward, I had to admit with my red swollen eyes that I was hideous. R was right, I was disgusting. I listened to REM’s sad anthem, Everybody Hurts on repeat and identified with The Who’s Behind Blue Eyes, mainly because the song was weepy and I literally have blue eyes.

I started dreaming of a nose job when I was pretty young and in the back of my mind, it was all that I thought about until a boyfriend pointed out that I was fat and shouldn’t be eating ice cream. For the record, I’d always been very tall and very skinny but something happened around age fourteen where I started gaining weight. Now I had to worry about having a big nose, being the ugliest girl in school and also being fat. Great! (More on my weight issues coming soon) also, I was bad at math and terribly nonathletic.

Aside from having an undesirable nose, drawing comparisons to a young Barbra Streisand minus the talent, I was very pale with light hair and eyelashes. Begging my mother to allow me to wear makeup, I thought I could draw attention away from my nose to something else, maybe R would stop with the relentless teasing. My mother refused. I had no choice but to take those insults like physical blows.

The worst thing I did, such bold retaliation, was to get an old Gap bag of dog poop and throw it at him. Because of my fantastic athletic skills, the blue bag ended up landing in the middle of E. Center Street where a bunch of boys stood around and laughed at me.

His cruel words, so deeply embedded in my brain, haunted me past graduation. I knew I was ugly, my nose was big, yes I was a hideous swamp creature. Every time someone made a casual comment about my looks, I called up that sick, sad feeling from my teen years.

The first nose job happened like this, I was working as a hostess in a restaurant at age twenty-three and everyone was in the office, looking at the next weeks schedule.

“You know who you look like?” one of the bus boys asked out of the blue.

I shrugged and cringed. I knew what was coming.

“Kind of like Suzanne Somers!”

I relaxed a little and smiled.

“And Barbara Streisand!”

I faked a smile and laughed but my face grew red, palms damp and I decided I’d get that nose job I’d been dreaming about since I was a child.

First mistake- I went to a plastic surgeon who didn’t do very good work. I lived in North Carolina at the time the internet was not a thing yet so I couldn’t research or read yelp reviews. I opened the phone book, went to P for Physicians and picked the first name I saw. I got a credit card so I could pay for the surgery, arranged for friends to help me during the aftercare and went in early one morning for what I thought would be my life changing nose job.

I wanted a lovely Kim Basinger nose. Once I had that, I could let go of those insecurities from my youth that I couldn’t seem to shake. No one would ever tell me I had a big nose or that I was ugly. I would approach life head-on, not hiding from cameras as I frequently did. How freeing it would be to just be myself! A cuter version, but myself.

Days after the surgery, I was jumping out of my skin to see my new and improved nose but was let down like a deflated helium balloon to see I still looked the same. Maybe worse because I had bruising around my eyes and my nose looked like a fluffy potato.

“Its okay,” the doctor said, “You’re still healing! Its going to look great.”

But it didn’t look great. Not only did my nose still have a slight bump, that bump now seemed a little more pronounced and also sharper like a point.

I don’t know what the doctor did but I did not have a Kim Basinger nose.

Was it possible that I now looked worse?

He agreed to do a second surgery, free of charge since the first one didn’t go so well. Again, I had high expectations but when the swelling came down and the final look was evident, it was even worse than what I started with. It was bad. So bad, that when I saw a friend who I hadn’t seen in a few years, she asked me if I had been in a car accident.

Over time, part of my nose had caved in, the nostrils were uneven, I looked like a boxer who had been punched in the face. I was devastated. How had this happened to me?

I wanted to put the teasing and taunting behind me but how could I when I looked like I had been in an accident?

Fast forward to a few years later when I had trouble breathing thanks to a nose that was now collapsing. I went to an Ear Nose and Throat Doctor who suggested we rebuild my nose with cartilage from my ear.

“I’ll do anything!”

Once again, I went through surgery where my nose was rebuilt and I could breathe but now instead of having a dip in the bone, I had a giant hump. My nostrils were very uneven, my nose was large and lumpy.

The doctor agreed I needed a little more work and offered to have me come into his office where I sat on the examination table while he trimmed inside my nose, without anesthesia. It was so bloody that one of the nurses had to leave the room. I comforted the other nurse though I was the one with a scalpel up my nose.

I went back to the office for minor procedures and finally I was done messing with my nose. For the most part, I ignored it. I slowly moved away when anyone brought out a camera, I hid when someone took out a video camera. I hated looking in the mirror and I felt like R’s cruel childhood words were indeed true. I was ugly. My nose was a mess.

Years later I was married and with kids but still very self conscious. Because I ran my beauty blog, I was invited to all kinds of events and one in particular found me sitting next to an effortlessly gorgeous beauty blogger who casually mentioned she worked for two plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills, they specialized in revision rhinoplasties. I gave her the short version of my saga and soon after made an appointment to see the doctors.

Though my husband was against any more surgery, I had to do this. My nose was lumpy and uneven and when I breathed, it was was stuffy. I wanted to finally be normal and have a normal nose and be someone who could have a photo taken without leaving the room when a camera came out.

Throughout the years of blogging, I had saved nearly every penny I earned so that when this day came, I could pay for it. I happily drained my little account so I could pay for the revision.

I dreamed of a more confident version of myself. I had visions of heading to our class reunions and showing R that I was indeed not the ugly hideous creature he had drilled into my head nearly every day from grade one to senior year. Why I thought of R at this point in my life I really don’t know other than it was his cruelty that followed me like a stalker through my life.

If you’ve ever had a nose job, the recovery is brutal. You’re swollen, face is puffy, eye area is discolored, you’re likely in pain, there’s stuff shoved up your nose that’s like one of those scarves from a magicians sleeve that never stops.

I made up my mind that no matter what the outcome, this would be my last surgery. But like the great sage Justin Bieber implores us, Never say never!

How much could one person do to their face? When the band aids came off and the swelling went down and time passed, I was still not happy with the results because my nose was and is still not even and small and perfect.

But oh my gosh, what I went through. Its definitely better than it was before when it had a divot in it, its better than when there was too much cartilage and the funny thing is that it almost looks like the nose I was born with.

For some reason, many issues from childhood are coming back to me now, things that I feel I need to address then move on from so I can enjoy the second half of my life.

I have tried to drill into my own children not to make fun of people because we cannot change how we look and sometimes, cruel words stay with us long after childhood is over.

(This article is a kind of Part Two to this one: How Being Teased As A Child Helped Me Be a Kinder Adult.)