A break from pictures.

I thought I would take a break from posting what I've been involved in and putting up pictures. If that is what you were looking for, there will be new pictures and Wisconsin ANTSO National Miss updates within the week. I felt inspired to write the following and hope whoever is reading this will be able to take something away from it...

When I was born my mom said I had the most beautiful lips she had ever seen. Of course being my mom she would think that. I’m not sure the exact time line as to when the event occurred, but within a few days after I was born my top lip started to puff out and turn purplish red. I was brought into the doctors by my parents not knowing what was happening to their newborn baby girl. That is when my parents were told that I had developed a hemangioma. Since my definition would probably be more general, here is Mayo Clinic definition of what a hemangioma is: “a birthmark that appears as a bright red patch or a nodule of extra blood vessels in the skin”. Basically, I had this puffy red mass that covered up from the top of my lip to my nose. Like a big vascular mustache of sorts. My parents did not want this to affect how I viewed myself. There was another little girl that went to the same pediatrician as I did whose parents insisted on covering up an oversized mole on her forehead with a Band-Aid. I’m sure that did a lot for her self esteem.

There are only so many times your family members can tell you that you are beautiful without starting to believe there is some kind of bias. My sister brought me to school to meet a kid in her class that had a hemangioma for encouragement. That was all fine and well, but it still affected me. I couldn’t drink out of bottles because it would make the hemangioma that much more inflamed. My face looked like I had gotten into some kind of brawl, and believe me, people asked about it. Around first grade I also developed a mole on my head that had to be removed. In order for the removal a portion of my hair had to be shaved off. This was near devastating for a six year old little girl. It was about this time that I decided that my hemangioma needed to go. I could not possibly deal with a partially shaved head and a huge hemangioma on my face. One night when my nose was raw from Kleenex usage because of a cold, I devised a plan to rip off my hemangioma. I felt something had to be done. I grabbed a piece of skin and just pulled. Blood was everywhere. I don’t know what exactly I did, but it actually did work…sort of.

By the time my self-inflicted wound had healed up and a few years had gone by, the damage of both the hemangioma and my attempt to fix it was evident. When hemangiomas disappear, as most do, they leave some deformation to the area affected. Due to my master plan a noticeable pitted round scar had formed. The left side of my lip stayed swollen and became pigmentless. Literally, it is still white to this day. This in turn led to my affinity with colored lip gloss. Also the indentation area (I have no clue what this is called) below my nose did not form correctly.

In 7th grade I received a letter from a plastic surgeon. He had lobbied for my facial cause and wanted to perform reconstructive surgery on my face for free. I couldn’t believe it as I held the letter in my hands. This was my chance to look like everyone else. They were going to remove the extra portion of my lip and in essence fold in the scar so it would not be visible. There was talk of putting collagen in my lips to even them out, and they would then reconstruct the “indentation” below my nose. This was going to be my life changing moment…the moment where I could finally feel “normal”.

I mentioned to my best friend about the surgery. She didn’t even notice the scar or the fact that my lip was half white. I guess the lip gloss really did pay off. What I obsessed about and I noticed every time I looked in the mirror or looked at a photograph of myself others did not see. I mean I really had to point it out for her to notice, and she saw me every day. It was then that I decided I would turn down the offer for plastic surgery, and decided then I would never get plastic surgery. I’m not saying that it isn’t wonderful for other people, but it was not for me. It made me think that if I was so upset over this malformation that no one else seemed to notice, how much do we all obsess over imperfections that others do not see?

I started thinking about all of this when I was brushing my teeth before bed last night. I looked in the mirror at my makeup-less face, and couldn’t believe how I was ever traumatized by my birthmark. It really did not matter in the long run of things. I’m thankful my parents didn’t make a big deal out of it the way the girl with the forehead mole’s parents had done to her. The only thing that ever bothered me was other people questioning my birthmark, and in essence questioning me. I was letting other’s perceptions of who I was and how I looked destroy my self-concept and at times my happiness. Really their opinion of me in no way shaped who I am as a person. I had a hemangioma on my face. So what, I’m graduating college with a theatre degree. I still have a scar on my face. So what, I’m Miss Wisconsin ANTSO National Miss and placed in the top 10 at nationals. I could still accomplish whatever I set my mind to. At some point we all need to realize that there is nothing more important than accepting who you are as a person. If you do not like who you are, how is anyone else ever supposed to?