How To Love Your Face (from Slate's How To!)
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- Hey everyone, Chris Duffy here. We have something a little bit different for you today. Instead of another episode of How to Be a Better Human, we have a guest episode. It's an episode from one of my favorite podcasts, How To from Slate. And each week on How To, co-host Carvel Wallace finds solutions to listeners' problems with the help of some of the smartest people around. In this episode that you're about to hear, a listener named Rel called in because she was self-conscious about having a so-called lazy eye. It's a condition that she was born with,

But Rell worries that it's holding her back at her job and in her personal life. However, Carvel brings in the perfect expert to talk with Rell and to help her find the mirror that matters most. Who is that expert? Well, you're going to have to keep listening if you want to find that out. And for more life changing conversations, you can subscribe to How To wherever you get your podcasts. Now I'm going to turn it over to host Carvel Wallace. Welcome to How To. I'm Carvel Wallace.

I was thinking about my work lately and I realized that pretty much everything I write, at least in my mind, comes down to love on some level. Like personal love, political love, community love. All these stories that I work on always come down to people trying to figure out how to love what needs loving and how to get over the things that stand in the way of loving. And whether that's loving someone else or loving ourselves, it always ends up being about love.

Which is why I was especially drawn to this week's question from our listener, Rel. I'm just a great fan of the show and I listen to each episode, even if it isn't directly relevant to my life. And I thought I would write in with the thing that I'm struggling to kind of let go of. And it's a condition with my eye that I was born with. Colloquially, it's called a lazy eye. And I just feel like it's that ugly thing I can't let go of.

As Rel explains it, her eye isn't receiving all the information from her brain. She underwent surgery as a kid, which didn't fully correct the eye's function. And ever since, her eye's appearance has been this way. It has had a mark on my life. I've almost failed job.

interviews for not looking at people directly. It's not my style to make eye contact either because of the eye issue or because I'm worried someone will notice the eye issue. I feel like it's less about the eye. It's about letting go of that thing that you feel that there's a spotlight on. What has your relationship to self-confidence been like growing up and is it different now? How has it evolved over time?

It's funny, my youth up to age 10 or 11 or 12 or whatever, I probably wasn't conscious of it and then everything hit. Then it's the lazy eye and I'm a person who's biracial in a white family and that hit. And body image, all of it. I think I've learned from a very early age that looking at my face can make people feel uncomfortable. They blink because they're like, there's something wrong with my eye. There's something not computing here.

So to avoid all that, I'm not likely to look you straight on. I was fortunate to get a new doctor at one point in the last five years, and I lived in this bubble that, oh, it's not that noticeable. And first thing, within seconds of meeting me, he said, okay, what's going on with your eye? Is that an injury? What's happening there? And I thought, oh, my God.

So I was like, okay, there's a little tiny part of my face and they can just, they can see there's this lack of symmetry or whatever it is. Those moments kind of jolt me back into a version of my reality where I feel it's obvious.

At some point, does it feel like you have to hold everyone's reactions that you interact with and that's part of the burden? That like you don't just get to be yourself, you also have to deal with every single person's reaction? 100% and there's a mix. I have a unique name. My race is not obvious, right? There's so many things. I feel like I'm on the hot seat and in my heart, I'm introverted and I've been shy. I'm less shy now.

So there's just this exhaustion. I have to hold all that and I have to pick which thing I'm going to explain if I'm going to explain it. So on today's show, we're going to face Rel's question head on. How do you learn to love your face or really any physical trait that's created years of avoidance and self-consciousness? Should it even be on you to embrace it? And how do you deal with strangers reactions ad nauseum?

Joining us in this conversation is the award-winning playwright and author, Sarah Ruhle. My first reaction is just tears. Like, partly the vulnerability of hearing you share your story with me brings me to tears. And also, I relate with so much of it. Sarah opened her book, The Story of a Face, with this beautiful passage about her experience with Bell's palsy.

Sarah is going to help Rell make her way toward love, acceptance, and finding the mirror that matters most.

And if you don't think this applies to you, well, I'm pretty sure most of us have something we're a little self-conscious about when we meet somebody new. So definitely stay with us.

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Hello, hello. I'm Malik. I'm Jamie. And this is World Gone Wrong, where we discuss the unprecedented times we're living through. Can your manager still schedule you for night shifts after that werewolf bit you? My ex-boyfriend was replaced by an alien body snatcher, but I think I like him better now. Who is this dude showing up in every episode?

Everyone's old pictures. My friend says the sewer alligators are reading maps now. When did the kudzu start making that humming sound? We are just your normal millennial roommates processing our feelings about a chaotic world in front of some microphones. World Gone Wrong, a new fiction podcast from Audacious Machine Creative, creators of Unwell, a Midwestern Gothic Mystery. Learn more at audaciousmachinecreative.com.

Find World Gone Wrong in all the regular places you find podcasts. I love you so much. I mean, you could like up the energy a little bit. You could up the energy. I actually don't take notes. That was good. I'm just kidding. You sounded great. So did you.

On the day after Sarah Rule's twins were born, she noticed something had changed. A lactation consultant had come in to teach me how to breastfeed two babies at the same time. And then she said, your eye looks a little droopy. And I thought she was being like kind of rude. And I made a joke about being like Irish, you know, because my uncles, when they're drunk, their eyes, you know, fall down. She's like, that's not what I'm talking about. Look in the mirror and my whole life.

left side of my face had fallen down and was paralyzed. And it was such a shock because I was one person inside before looking in the mirror and felt like I was another person after. And I was diagnosed with Bell's palsy, which is paralysis of the seventh cranial nerve. And it's idiopathic, meaning people don't totally know why you get it or whether it will get better, which

which can be really frustrating because they'll say, "It will probably get better within three months, but we don't know. You might be a person for whom it never gets better." By that point, you were already, I would say, something of a public figure as like a renowned writer. And I wonder if this changed the way that you interacted with your career, particularly the kind of public-facing part of it.

I retreated. I tried not to. I tried not to retreat, but I think I did. I mean, the most, to me, kind of hilarious but sad example is I had just been nominated for a Tony Award for this play in the next room where the vibrator play, and it was right after I'd gotten the Bell's palsy, and we had to go to this vanity fair thing where they take your picture,

of all the nominees and I didn't want to go and my agent said you should go so I was standing there on the red carpet and this phalanx of photographer was like smile smile for your Tony Award and I was just like really doing my best and they're like what's wrong with you aren't you happy can't you smile for your Tony Award and I said actually I can't my face is paralyzed and

And they're like, oh, they're like totally chasing me and not know what to do with me. But with Bell's palsy, there's definitely the feeling of managing other people's reactions. And for me, for a long time, not wanting to try to smile or laugh because...

That gave rise to needing to explain because that's when my face sometimes looked like it was grimacing, particularly in the early phases. And I think also the effect on the self of creating that neutrality. I think for you, it sounds like it's looking away. And for me, it was sort of not smiling, not making expression on my face. It led to a removal of

from social life, social engagement, a kind of ghosting and also an inner expressionlessness because I was manifesting an outward lack of expression, engagement. And I feel like you came so to the right place in terms of me because not only do I have this asymmetry, but two of my kids have amblyopia. My son had surgery when he was

I think three to move his eye over. And so I'm well aware of, you know, part of how that goes. And I also am an introvert. So I also identify keenly, keenly with that. And I'm married to a biracial man who often decides whether or not to explain why.

where he's from or what his ethnicity is. Anyway, I relate so, so much with everything that you're saying. You know, it's interesting for me because the one link that I keep seeing is this feeling of having to hold the weight of other people's need to understand and process your story along their framework. For me, one of the experiences I have with that is that it generates a fair amount of like

some silent resentment inside me. Like I'm just annoyed that I constantly have to organize my whole life around the parts of me that defy explanation or that other people need to have explained. That gives me a certain amount of resentment and I might turn that inward. I tend to be more of a depressive type of person. But I'm wondering, Rel, if you experience like resentment or anger or frustration ever at all? - Yeah, I think it's a great question.

I almost failed a competition, and in government we call that a process to get a promotion. And I didn't realize it until I asked for the feedback afterwards. And they said, yeah, we just about failed you for oral communication. You weren't looking at us, you were looking at the wall. I was so disappointed and frustrated. It wasn't whether my answers were solid or well-prepared. It was some optics things. And I also want to just land a little bit on what Sarah said around communication.

When to explain? I guess I don't feel I get to get a moment to explain it in a moment that feels comfortable to me. So should I go into interviews again or whatever, social interactions, blind dates, whatever it is, do I have to front with this when...

I have a lot of other interesting things about my life that I would like to share. So for an interview in person, for sure, I'm going to handle it differently because I didn't like that I got, I felt like I got kind of penalized. But I don't consider this a disability. It is more of a visual thing that's happening with my face. I don't see in 3D. There's lots of other, you know, you don't want me as your China's partner. Right.

I'm holding that railing when I go downstairs. I've fallen downstairs before. My depth perception doesn't exist, etc. But I feel it's minor until others make it more major. And then I struggle with how to calibrate to the responses. I think the question you pose about when to explain is such a deep one in terms of how much you want it to foreground your identity.

And there were times when I found an explanation really helped me, like diffuse things helped get it out of the way. And sometimes it felt a little stilted, but it did help the conversation that came next, you know, like a little palate cleanser. Meeting parents at kindergarten for the first time, I would say, just so you know, I might seem unfriendly. I actually am friendly, but the left side of my face is paralyzed, so it doesn't seem like I'm friendly all the time. They go, oh, okay, fine.

And then we'd move on and I would do it, you know, in those situations or teaching or sometimes in professional settings. And I found that the more I did it, actually, the less I had to explain, which I don't know what that means. Maybe it's that my face was also getting progressively better and I could show more emotion as the years passed. But I think in a funny way, the explanation was for myself as well.

So that the more I explained to other people, it was like a kind of coming out. Like instead of let's have this tacit agreement that we both, you want to ask what's going on with my face. I don't want to talk about it. Like instead of that being subtext, it just kind of makes the subtext text and it helped me to move on.

I'm just learning from that that maybe there are certain situations that would just be easier to front it. I had an example recently. I just switched jobs. I'm a manager and I was meeting my team one-on-ones and I had a sense there might be something going on with one of my team members' eyes. And it was like this relief that I could be like, I'm going to talk about my eyes. It's going to be great. And I said, hey, just so you know, if I don't appear to be looking at you,

Maybe I'm not because there's anyways, I think and this woman very generously shared where I was injured in a childhood accident didn't work at all. And it was like this moment of bonding. And that was a one on one in a very small room. I just felt it was a safe. I sensed there would be a connection there. That was all very lovely. And I like the example Sarah gave about.

So it just makes me kind of pensive about, huh, when could I have a script? And in general, I don't. Yeah, in general, I don't. Well, because it can feel sort of, I don't know, it can feel weird and it can feel rote. I don't want to take up space in that way. So I have to push myself to do it. What is it about the self-erasure and also the kind of mirror neurons when you find someone else who is the same?

who helped, like that woman in the situation. There's one incident in the book I talk about where I finally have lunch with someone else with unrecovered Bell's palsy, this man, Jonathan Kalb, who wrote about it in The New Yorker. And I remember reading it at the time and almost not wanting to read it because...

It was so painful to imagine that I might not recover. And Jonathan talked so heartbreakingly about not recovering. And finally, when I was writing the book, I thought, okay, I have an excuse to calm. So I finally reached out and he was so happy to have lunch. And just the fact of seeing his face and having compassion for his face and thinking when he would laugh and sort of turn away because when someone with Bell's palsy laughs, it can look

asymmetrical or like a grimace. And I thought, no, look at me, stay with me. I know what it's like. Or when we were eating and, you know, food would like dribble out or something.

because sometimes it can be hard to eat a big bite with Bell's palsy if your muscles aren't working properly. And we could just laugh about it. It was so healing for me, just a single meal. And I think, God, how do we silo ourselves? We keep each other from having these connections. Or at least I did because I'm

I think so introverted. And I look back and I thought, why did I not join a Bell's palsy support group? Like immediately, what a relief that would have been. It's very, very, very deeply nourishing conversation. But I think one thing that sort of sticks with me is how much is on us and how much is on others to be like, can you just deal with difference? Right. Can you just recalibrate and not, not quiz me about it or like have your reaction and then

move on, right? Couldn't this be part of just body positivity and honoring difference and not putting it on me? As much time as we've spent talking about our inner tension and fronting conversations, at what point can we say it's just on others to deal with it? We'll try to answer that right after this quick break.

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I want to tell you about a new podcast from NPR called Wild Card. You know, I am generally not the biggest fan of celebrity interview shows because they kind of feel packaged, like they've already told these stories a bunch of times before. But Wild Card is totally different because the conversation is decided by the celebrity picking a random card from a deck of conversation starters. And since even the host, Rachel Martin, doesn't know what they're going to

pick. The conversations feel alive and exciting and dangerous in a way because they're vulnerable and unpredictable. And it is so much more interesting than these stock answers that the celebrities tend to give on other shows. You get to hear things like Jack Antonov describe why boredom works or Jenny Slate on salad dressing or Issa Rae on the secret to creativity. It is a beautiful, interesting show, and I love it. Wildcard comes out every Thursday from NPR. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back with Sarah Ruhl, author of " The Story of a Face," and Rell, who right before the break asked a very good question: Why is it on me to placate strangers about my eye? I totally agree. And I think that the thing that makes it tricky for the face is the possible misinterpretation of what the face is doing.

So that, you know, you were talking about just being misinterpreted or which enrages me about your job interview. I agree. It should be part of body positivity. But sometimes it's these subtextual cues that people don't even know they're making emotional judgments unless you kind of say, look, here's the situation. My face might be conveying something wrong.

I'm not intending to convey which is really awkward because how we're taught is those cues are supposed to be silent and subtextual. And so to say, I'm making it visible can be awkward, but at least then you can move on. I mean, I remember a similar situation with a doctor too when you said the doctor was like, "What's going on with your eye?" She was asking if I had any conditions that would affect my child and I said, "Well, I have celiac disease." She said,

Yeah. And she said, anything else? And I said, no. She said, well, I can see that you have Bell's palsy. And I was like, oh, God damn it. She can see it still. Because I think at that point it had been a year and I thought no one's supposed to still be able to see it. And I felt so seen in a way I didn't want to be seen, seen with a medical gaze. And yet other times it's helpful to feel seen. Like someone who was going through the same thing to say, I see you.

I see what you're going through instead of all of my friends who pretended that they didn't see it or in fact didn't see it because they loved me and they filled in the history of how they knew my face to be or react to them. You know, so I don't know if you make a distinction between intimates who know what your intentions are and strangers.

I just love that theme and it comes back to Carvel's opening remarks. Like, my best friends, like, never noticed. She actually said that, I've never noticed. And I thought, for me, that's lovely, right? That's sort of where I would embrace what you're saying, Sarah, right? The all of me is there, this whatever, this I thing, whatever it is. Anyway, maybe that person just isn't an I-focused person. Yeah.

There's a frustration that rel a voiced about Why can't people just fucking deal with it? It made me wonder

How you, Sarah, in particular, recognize the difference between this is a thing I need other people to do differently and this is a thing that I just have to accept that this is how people are going to be and I need to deal with this in my own particular way for me. I feel like it kept shifting, kept shifting as relationships between self and other always are shifting and as we make the self based on a social self.

Like I remember I had this production of my play Passion Play very soon after the Bell's palsy and my mother was sitting on my Bell's palsy side and she's an actress and she had had Bell's palsy. Anyway, she was watching the show and she kept checking in with me nervously, like just looking at me. And finally she whispered, are you not pleased?

And I said, I'm very pleased. I have Bell's palsy. My face can't move. And she's like, oh my God. And she felt so bad that she was my own mother. She had had the condition herself and still she was so conditioned to read my social cues that she felt nervous and felt the need to check in. So I don't know. I don't know what the point is where you just think, deal with it. I'm not explaining myself. And when it's helpful to the self-awareness

To explain, I did feel writing the book for me was incredibly healing. And making a narrative out of what had happened to me made me so much less angry. I mean, you talked about, I think, mild irritation. For me, it was rage. I was enraged about what was happening there.

My experiences with doctors, the fact that I wasn't getting better, my inability to express myself produced so much rage. And I'm a fairly mild-mannered person, so it didn't manifest outwardly. It was just buried. And somehow writing a book made sense of it for me, and I'm no longer angry about it. So I do think putting language to it and not having it be buried in non-language language

for me helped me get it out of my viscera somehow. Okay. Though I've said low-grade irritation, the word I'd written in my notes is there's actually just a lot of shame. I'm listening to your journey on the medical side. One of the things I want to let go of is all the energy I've spent in Googling how to fix this situation with the eye.

I mean, I had surgery as a kid, you know, very well-intentioned, may have made things slightly better, but didn't correct. But I was saying to one of the producers, oh, there's a Tetris game you can play that may correct the eye, you know, testing that. It can put you in a dark room for two weeks, maybe rewire your brain. Like the energy spent fixing this eye versus being at peace, you know,

I'm weighing both of those things, the shame and the fixing and wanting a different path out. It is what it is. I'm really struck, Raoul, by your use of the word correct. And I know that that's what it says, like we need to correct this, correct this. But is there a way in which...

in which this is viewed as already correct, fine as it is. Like, you know what I'm saying? Not that, like, boy, there's this correct way for things to be in my way. It's not the correct way. And I just have to spend the rest of my life learning how to live with that and put other people at ease around the fact that my thing is incorrect. Like, you didn't choose this. You didn't make this happen. This isn't the result of...

And I'm asking that philosophically. That's so beautifully said. And I found a lot with having something that's chronic, there was always that toggling between the

I want to be done with this and accept myself as I am and the kind of late night Googling, how do I get better? I was so ashamed. I didn't even know I was ashamed about the Bell's palsy. That's how deeply it was buried. Because rationally, I thought, why would I be ashamed of this? This just happened to me.

And yet it was persistent, not wanting to look in the mirror, not wanting to look at people, hating how I looked in photographs, and feeling weirdly that there was something wrong with me for not getting better. People would ask me, well, why didn't you pursue more second opinions early on? Why didn't you call that friend up who was a neurologist? And I would say, well, I guess I was ashamed. And I came to the idea that shame is when the body...

does something that you don't have control over, you know, that it's different from guilt where you feel you did something wrong, that there's something about shame, which is about a lack of control. And releasing that is a big deal, I think, in terms of accepting oneself. People are terrified of sickness because, like Sarah just said, we don't want to lose control of our bodies.

Sometimes I wonder if that in and of itself is just the root of all ableism, which is the tendency to discriminate against anyone with any kind of disability. Of course, the ultimate irony is that we are all going to lose control of our bodies one day. That's just part of the deal.

But during this stretch of time, this period in which we consider ourselves abled and healthy, there's a lot of anxiety around disorders and disabilities, which means if you are one of the people who is currently experiencing one of these so-called disorders or disabilities, you find yourself on the receiving end of everyone's anxieties.

I think that's a really profound point and I had read some kind of memoir about someone who's missing part of a limb. His reasoning for why people kept saying, "Oh, what happened? What happened?" is if you'd say it happened at birth, which is my explanation, palpable relief. They're like, "Okay, well, I got through that. I'm probably gonna be okay." Right? Like this weird transfer. Is this gonna happen to me? Is this gonna happen to my eye?

It evokes everybody else's vulnerability. Are my eyes going to stop working? It's like, maybe they will. Maybe not for the same reason. So the question, I mean, and this is for either one of you actually, because this is at least nominally an advice show, is given the fact that

to be in any way, again, the hugest air quotes of all, "disordered" or "disabled," puts you at the receiving end of every "able-bodied" person's anxieties about losing their power and autonomy. How do we survive that? How do we...

maintain our peace in our space and our prosperity and our full humanity in the face of all the energy coming toward us, especially when, as you mentioned at the beginning, Rel, it is a thing at which you don't even have to consent for people to recognize or acknowledge or engage with you about. As soon as they look at you, they see it. And as soon as they lay eyes on you, already you're in the crosshairs of their stuff. How do we keep ourselves together underneath that? There's a story that comes to mind after I wrote my book called

I was talking to my editor on the phone in the car and my daughter was maybe 12 and was in the back seat listening. And my editor was actually asking, would I classify my book as disability literature? She'd had some question from a book club. We were sort of going back and forth. Was it a disability? Did I take that moniker? Like, did I identify as such? We're talking about it. And afterwards I got off the phone and I said, oh, that must have been interesting to you, Anna.

And she said, oh, yeah. And I said, well, what did you think? She said, well, mom, I guess I always kind of thought that your face was this beautiful house and a wall suddenly fell down and crumbled and you kept trying to build it back up brick by brick and you couldn't quite. But when I look at you, all I see is my home.

Oh, my God. I thought, dear God, well, if she told me that, maybe I wouldn't have had to write this book. I would have been cured, you know, by her complete unconditional love. But it took talking about it in public for me to receive that love, to know about her love and acceptance and love.

And I think in our world, we sort of talk about self-acceptance a lot, like that it's good to do and we should do it. And I agree. But I do think there's something about the social self where for me, like...

Maybe I got it from my daughter. Is that wrong? I couldn't get it only from inside my little atomic universe. You know, maybe we get it from our friends, our coworkers, our parents, or a stranger we meet on the subway. I would like to think we could go deep inside our solitary selves or read a book about

And heal our shame. And maybe we can, but sometimes I do think it comes from another person who helps us along the way. Mm-hmm.

which is maybe the whole reason that this podcast exists, you know, that what you were saying at the beginning of this conversation about love and we're all a little bit broken. Well, the like, the kind of like self-love industrial complex, as I always witness it, and it's like sort of public online iteration, does always strike me as remarkably tied into our general cultural belief that everything can be, must be done by yourself.

In other words, not enough emphasis on community. I mean, I don't know how we're supposed to navigate all the things we have to navigate without...

the love that can only be generated in community. But I do think, Sarah, that's a little bit of what you're talking about. And to that end, as you said in your email, Rel, I have to say, this topic is not just about, oh, what do I do about this weird thing my face does? This topic is about something a lot bigger. And it may be too early to tell this because we've just had this conversation and things of this level require some time to process. But

Rel, how do you feel like you'll think about your I differently going forward? I think the two things that sit with me are Sarah really tuning me into that there may be situations where that little script on the cue card might be helpful. And so that's really quite a light bulb moment and it makes me feel armed in a good way.

And then second, just really profound to have it floated into view, how much my love for others transcends their physical bodies and how that must be going in two directions. Asymmetry doesn't define us. In fact, asymmetry, I've come to realize, invites care. You know, that our vulnerabilities, our fragilities invite the care of others. It's actually our perfections that are distancing us.

that make people people think oh god i don't want to talk to that person they're so perfect but in fact our fragility our asymmetry invites the beloved to say i too i too am asymmetrical i i too walk through the world with with some level of brokenness so i'm just really moved that you wrote in i'm really honored to be part of this podcast which

builds community in such a beautiful way. So just very, very grateful to be here. A sincere thank you to Rell and Sarah Ruhl for letting us explore this with you. Before we let Sarah go, I asked her to read this final passage from "Smile." As I near the end of this story, what I would like to say to myself is this: I would like to accept my face, my story, as it is written on my face, my joy.

And what I would like to tell you, reader or listener, though I don't know you, though I have never met you, is I love your face. I love your eyes reading across the page, the wrinkles, the furrowed brow, whatever asymmetries you might have, whether it's a yellow snaggle tooth like mine or a crooked smile like mine, all the lines denoting story. This mole, that scar,

all our protuberances, battle scarred, wounded, incomplete, almost healed, barely healed, or never going to be healed in the outward sense, not in this lifetime, scar-tissued or just plain growing older, oh how beautiful you are. I want to cherish the wrinkle that is a marker of whatever it is that makes your joy hard won and human. A little prayer: May all the broken faces heal.

May what appears to be broken actually be in the midst of an untold, unforeseeable healing. Is there something in your life that needs healing?

Send us a note at howtoatslate.com or you can call us up and leave a voicemail at 646-495-4001. We would love to have you on the show. And if you like what you heard today, then give us a rating or review. Tell your friends, spread the word far and wide. This helps us connect to more people.

HowTo's executive producer is Derek John. Rosemary Belson and Kevin Bendis produced this episode. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director. Amanda Ripley is my co-host. And Charles Duhigg created the show. I'm Carvel Wallace. Thanks for listening.

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