226: What if you had three different faces?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I would look in the mirror and my eyes wouldn't focus because it was like my brain wasn't registering that that was me. Like I would look and that was not myself staring back. I literally saw a stranger in the mirror. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

Episode 226: What if you had three different faces?

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I think I had a virtually idealistic childhood. Of course, I had some struggles. My parents got divorced when I was like five, but my parents really sheltered us from that.

I was always a little bit different. And I was always described very much as an old soul from as long as I can remember. I was kind of like a mini adult. My brother and I were. Our favorite foods when we were like two were iced tea, black unsweetened iced tea, and sushi. It was our favorite thing to eat. It's all we wanted to eat. We could talk politics at the dinner table at five years old.

I've always been self-assured and knew who I was and very independent. And that has definitely sustained me. But looking back, I kind of regret that. I wish I had more time to be a kid and to have the innocence of the world that I've now lacked.

When I was an adolescent, I was virtually a normal kid. I was on the dance team. I did well in school. I was very academically driven. Just kind of stumbling through as you do, trying to figure things out, trying to decide who I wanted to be. When I was 15, I had started to struggle with my mental health.

And that started to affect other parts of my life. I started to struggle in school more. I struggled in relationships with my friends and my family. I had just been finishing finals and excited for Christmas break and to see family. And I thought I had a cold. You know, I had a runny nose and had to plug my nose for all finals. It was very just basic flu kind of symptoms.

I had been going to all of these like urgent care, you know, just getting what I could to help me feel better, to get me through finals. And nobody was alarmed. I wasn't alarmed. I had been a very healthy kid my whole life. I barely ever went to the doctor. I was never sick. And so it kind of became a different world for me very quickly because it just wouldn't go away.

I was feeling this way probably about a month at this point when it started to progress. So I was referred out to a general ENT. They prescribed me some antibiotics and just told me that they thought it was probably a sinus infection, nothing serious. Just take the meds and it will go away. And it started to progress worse and worse.

I come from a very push through it family, you'll be fine, just tough it out kind of philosophy. And I still was not alarmed at all. I was trying to keep up in school, but I was starting to struggle because I was missing more days. And the symptoms were affecting my sleep and affecting how I could get work done. And I had doctor's appointments, so I'd have to miss school. And sometimes I wouldn't be able to make it through a whole day of school.

Still, it was tolerable, but the symptoms just started to get weirder. I would get these migraines for about 14 hours a day, and they were just debilitating. And I remember I would hit my head against a wall because they would hurt so much I needed to numb the pain. And I would lay on the shower floor for just hours, trying to let the steam alleviate some of that pressure and inflammation.

And still everybody told me I was fine. It seemed very wrong to me. I could not at this point make it through a whole day of school. The pain kept me up most of the night. I slept three hours, probably on a good night. And I started to have all these constant infections, constant ringing in my ears and ear infections, eye infections, sinus infections. So I kind of looked like a mess.

I was very lethargic. I remember I didn't have much emotion at all. I felt very just empty, like I had to put all of my energy into just making it through the next day. One of the main things that contributed to me being in this very emotionless state was I was on a lot of steroids because they're supposed to help with inflammation. And one effect of steroids is that you can enter a state of psychosis,

I had had a doctor tell my parents that they thought I was in a state of psychosis from the steroids, basically telling me it was all in my head and the feelings and actions I was exhibiting were not actually what was going on. I started to tell myself that too, that you're fine. Everybody gets sinus infections. Like I thought I was weak.

There was a big disconnect between what I was feeling physically and what I was being told because it made no sense. But I had one of the top specialists in my area tell me that it was a 2 out of 10 sinus infection, meaning I was virtually not sick at all. I was compartmentalizing a lot, I think, until it got to the point where I couldn't anymore

I had coughed so much, I had broken three ribs from coughing. And I didn't know for months. And I was dancing on three broken ribs and I was starting to struggle to breathe. My whole body just ached all the time. I started to have trouble walking. I had trouble sitting up.

I had not been able to eat well for months. I had lost so much weight. I was, I think, around 87 pounds at my lightest. My body was wasting away. All the while, I'm seeing all these very prominent specialists that are telling me that there's absolutely nothing wrong with me. And all these meds that they had given me were doing nothing. And I had become somewhat hopeless. I felt like a shell of a human.

My dad had pulled some strings to get me into another specialist. This doctor looked at me and really quickly just had this mood change. The energy in the room really changed and he started being kind of cold, like there was something off. The doctor called my dad and kind of yelled at him and we were all kind of taken aback.

He pretty much just said, "Enough's enough. We've been trying things for too long. You need to take her to the hospital." We drove down to our children's hospital and pretty much instantly everybody was in my room. Racing around, I had my first IV put in. They were shoving tubes down my nose and it was just a whirlwind. So I woke up the next day in my hospital room and I remembered there was like 20 doctors.

I was the odd case that everybody was sending their medical students in to learn from, which I think would bother a lot of people. But I was just so happy to be getting some sort of medical attention. I had this weird moment in the ER where the doctors were comparing photos of my face.

because I had noticed this little almost bump on my nose. And it was nothing drastic, but it was like the structure of my nose was changing a little bit. And they had mentioned a name of this disease. It's called Wagoner's disease. It was named after a Nazi. We're also called granulomatosis with polyangiitis. And the one doctor who did said, don't look it up. But the results came back and it ended up coming back positive.

Basically, I have this strand of antibodies in my body called anchors, and they attack all my blood vessels. And mine is an autoimmune one, which means that my body attacks itself. Basically, these anchors attack my blood vessels with so much inflammation that they can really limit the blood flow or even cut off the blood flow, which can damage organs and tissues.

It's known to be one of the most difficult diseases to treat. And it's a chronic thing, so it's something that I will have forever.

I think it was expected of me to be very down about it. But in the moment, I was happy, surprisingly, I think, to have such a big reason for all the pain I had been feeling, especially all the months of having people tell me that there was nothing wrong with me and it was all in my head. It was incredibly validating.

I felt great peace in the fact that there was answers because I meant that I had something I could fix. There was a reason, a set path of how do we get myself to a healthy place. Everybody was kind of stressed out. They kept sending in psychiatrists to try to talk to me and therapists. And I would yell at them. I would scream at them to get out because I just, I didn't want to talk about it. We were just going to deal with it. As we had done, we just pushed forward together.

I just wanted to get back to life. I wanted to be a normal kid. And I never stopped to think about what was really going on. So at first, my disease responded very well to treatment. And I started to feel myself pretty quickly. I was still very weak and still struggling in some ways, but I didn't feel like I was wasting away anymore. But while I was in the hospital, my nose started to drastically change dramatically.

From all of the inflammation that had been in my head, all those migraines had actually been my disease attacking my face. So specifically my nose, it had cut off most of the blood flow to my nose and killed a lot of the cartilage in my nose. The outer cartilage in your nose gets eaten away.

It can happen with things like cocaine usage. It can happen with things like syphilis, but it's also very unique to my disease. They told me it was fixable and they told me I could probably get it fixed soon since I had responded so well to treatment. And I was like, hey, I'd get a free nose job. But at that age, I really didn't understand what everything would mean.

The deformity, even after I was being treated, was exasperated very significantly to the point where it started to eat away at my nasal bones and it started to get very severe. It's hard because you can only ignore things like that for so long, but I just didn't want to accept it. I want to be a normal kid, but I'm not a normal kid anymore. In my head, I still was. These experiences were not me.

So I went back to school like a week and a half later, and I acted like nothing had happened, even though I had half my nose pretty much eaten off my face. I had been on all these drugs that affected the way I looked. You know, the facial deformity made me look like a skeleton, made me look like I had wasted away and I had lost all this weight. I didn't look myself. I looked unhuman.

I had this idea that if I put on this very confident face, if I acted like it didn't affect me, then I did not open myself up to criticism.

If I acted like I was fine and this experience had bettered me as a person, everybody would not judge me, people wouldn't feel bad for me. I had to make it worth something because I didn't want people to think that that was me, that that monster of a human was me. The moments that I would see that monster were very few and far between. And when I looked in the mirror, I would break down.

I avoided mirrors. I avoided pictures. I remember I had told myself I was not going to let anybody take a picture of me from the side until I got my nose fixed. I only had to have that face for a short amount of time and it would all get fixed. It would be a time of my life that I could just forget about. There'd be no pictures. There'd be nothing. For a long time, I saw my nose as a symbol of my disease, of what it had done to me, of what it had taken from me.

It's such a strange deformity because you don't see somebody without a nose. And when you're in high school and you're 16, people don't know how to respond to that. And so it was a weird navigation of trying to decide how I was going to portray myself and my story from then on. And I think I was doing it for myself more than anybody else, that if I acted fine, that I was fine.

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. At the very beginning, it is all I thought about. The events would play over in my brain over and over and over again until, I don't know, it just was non-stop.

I just wanted that to be a part of my life that I could forget and not have that define me, which is not reality. And I tried to tell myself that I was so lucky that I had access to these resources. I tried to make good out of everything. I had to make this awful experience have some positivity in it. And looking back now, I realize that's impossible.

The first thing people say to you is you're so strong and you are all these things. And I could never do that. I could never have gone through such experiences.

But the reality is I never had a choice and I should never have had to gone through those experiences and I should never have had to be strong. And even though that was my lifeline back then, it's kind of also been the death of me too. Now I don't really know how to be anything else. I'm strong before most any other things. People don't know how to respond to disability, especially when it is a foreign one.

I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to say to myself. It's such a weird situation. It's such a unique situation. And nobody really knew how to console me. Not that I would have let them anyways, but I never really wanted people's pity. I was just trying to return to life and I didn't know what my life was going to be like. And I didn't know who I was anymore.

Even though I projected this very confident persona to others, it was nothing like what I had going on inside. I really didn't talk to myself nicely. I was very insecure. For a long time, I didn't leave my house. You know, my friends were gorgeous and normal, and I looked different. I didn't want to be put in places where I would naturally be compared, which is impossible.

I'd seen how much this experience had taken from me, and I didn't want it to consume me any further. You know, it had taken months of my life. It had taken my faith. It had taken a lot of my innocence. I had looked at my other friends, and they seemed like they could go about living their life and not have horrible things consume their every other thought. I had saw how much it had taken from me, and I couldn't let it take any more.

I was so determined to not let it that I would put on any face that I had to or I would be any persona or tell myself anything that would keep it from taking what little it had not yet taken. For a long time, I was actually pretty healthy after my first encounter with illness.

I'd gone back to school. I started dating a boy, you know, trying to do everything I could to be normal. And that lasted for a while until the following summer. And I started to get these awful migraines again. The test that is specific to my disease, it came back negative, which basically is supposed to mean that my disease was inactive. But that's not always the case. It can actually hide in your body.

But I had come to know my body so well. I knew there was something wrong. And I had this feeling again. So these doctors again didn't believe me, which was incredibly frustrating because I thought I had found a group of people that would believe me.

I had met at this time this doctor who has been incredibly important to me in my life since and has been kind of the only one to believe me consistently and stood up for me in that moment. And I eventually was right. It was a flare-up and I had to have treatment for it. And it progressed longer than it should have because I was not believed.

That one was a minor. I had recovered pretty quick. But from my disease being active again, my facial deformity continued to worsen and I continued to look more and more different. I again returned back to life. That early winter of that year, I started to have other symptoms. I started really struggling to breathe. I ended up in the hospital again and they learned I had something called tracheal stenosis, which

The inflammation started attacking my trachea. It had so much inflammation in there that it caused scar tissue to form over it. So like it was closing off. And it got to the point where I only had less than 10% of it left. I could not breathe. I could not talk for months. I kept having to have these surgeries to open it up and it kept coming back.

This entire time I had never been declared in remission. So I'd get sick for three months and then three months later I'd be slowly getting better and then I would get sick again. And it was very damaging mentally because I felt like I was just constantly fighting. It was like a constant battle against myself. It is my body attacking my own body.

It's weird because your body's the enemy and it's hard to want yourself to get better, to treat yourself kindly, to take care of yourself when it is your own self doing that to you. And also that the only way to get better is kind of to harm yourself, is to beat it down with all these bad drugs. But I had to just constantly fight myself. And I think that was very unhealthy for my mind.

It just felt constant. And what I accept is a realistic amount of pain because that's the reality of living with chronic illness is that you're never going to be at a baseline that matches people around you. You have to get used to some sort of baseline pain, which is hard and weird to accept, especially at such a young age when you should be feeling invincible. I want to be able to feel that sense of innocence, I think, that I never got to feel before.

They told me that I would have to be stable for around a year to get my nose done. And every time I would go to the doctor, I would hope and pray that they would say, yes, you're healthy enough. You've got the go ahead. But every time it was just a couple more months.

And so I was constantly just waiting for this surgery because that meant not only that I would have this better quality of life, but I think it I thought that it would help me distance myself from my disease, that identity. And that's all I lived for.

Finally, right before I went to college, I had my last surgery on my trachea and it was very successful and I had been the healthiest I had. And around that time, I started to struggle more again mentally. Being sick can kind of be a crutch for me because when I'm physically sick, it's easy for me to take care of myself and in ways that people know how to provide for me.

It's easier for me to accept support in physical ways. Strangely enough, they're almost like kind of healing times for me because all I have to focus on is myself versus I was kind of thrown into college and suddenly I was a normal kid almost. And they had all these responsibilities to be thrown into normal life when your life has not been really ever normal is hard sometimes.

especially when you're alone for the first time. And then I threw myself in again. I made a bunch of friends and I rushed a sorority, which talk about the seventh level hell is rushing a state school sorority with a facial deformity. Don't know what I was thinking, but yeah, I just had to be normal. I went and party all the time and I had to have the experiences everybody around me got to because I had missed out on so much.

Over time, my deformity had become less of a symbol of my disease, and it kind of started to be a symbol of my strength. I could look in the mirror, and I felt strong that I could go about life, and I could feel myself and be myself after all these horrible things that had happened. I had stayed true to myself. It didn't consume my every thought anymore.

And it started to be me too. It was kind of cute. And I was very identifiable. It became very me. I felt very like an individual because of it. But in November of that year, I was cleared for surgery to get my nose fixed. I did not sleep the whole night and I just cried. I was so happy. Was put on the books for January 9th, 2020. I was elated. I was through the roof. I felt like I could finally be who I wanted to be.

It was a very emotional moment for me. A little sentimental because I kind of had to say goodbye to this part of myself that I had worked so hard to be okay with. But all my friends and stuff, we had a countdown to my nose drop in my dorm room. Like we made it a joke and I of course had to make everything seem like nothing and unimportant. Everybody wrote me all these very kind notes and there were gift baskets. There was everything.

So we drive up to the Mayo Clinic where I'm treated at. And I had gone back to the operation room. They'd wheeled me back. And out of nowhere, I had the biggest panic attack of my life. Out of nowhere, just absolutely sobbing. I pretty much said, I don't know if I want to do this. It's like all the sneaking suspicions that had been sitting back there for months suddenly came to the front of my brain. I almost felt like I was almost betraying myself.

I had worked so hard to get where I wanted to be mentally and find my sense of self after having all of that stripped away. I don't look in the mirror anymore and hate what I see back. I think I felt power from that. I felt empowered from that to be so okay and so happy in a body that had betrayed me so much. And that had become a symbol of my strength. And it had become more than just like a facial differently to me. It had become part of me.

I think my worry in the moment was that I was giving up potentially a part of what had helped me get there in order for some sense of normalcy that I'd already achieved within myself. I felt like I was betraying all that work I had done just to look like everybody else. I had wanted it for so long that I was like, "Okay, just do it." And I told them, "Load me up on anti-anxiety meds, put me to sleep and just do it." So I got my surgery. It was a very intense surgery.

My surgeon said he did it all five times and closed it up and did it again and again until he thought he got the perfect nose. Who doesn't want a perfect face crafted by one of the best surgeons in the world? I woke up. I was fine. I was happy. I was like, that was a stupid little freakout and it will be fine. I was just nervous. It's a big surgery. The whole week I recovered pretty quick. I started walking around within like two days.

I went and I got my nails done with a friend. Like we went to the mall. I was bouncing right back and everything was fine. I started, I went to all my post-op appointments, but I started getting very nervous the night before I was supposed to get my cast off. So the morning of we went and he starts pulling off all the stitches and the packing and there was no mirrors in front of me. So everybody in front of me could see what I looked like.

And I remember them remarking that I had looked so much like I did before my nose collapsed. He asked me if I was ready to see my nose. And I said, yes. And he handed me a mirror and it took like everything and me to not sob right in front of him. But it was never about that. I thought really that it was like ugly. I was in a state of shock. There's a weird feeling when you look in the mirror and

I would look in the mirror and my eyes wouldn't focus because it was like my brain wasn't registering that that was me. Like I would look and that was not myself staring back. I literally saw a stranger in the mirror. And not just because I looked different, because my brain physically could not recognize myself. I remember it looked like somebody had like just glued somebody else's nose on my face. That's what I thought at least.

Then as soon as I got out of his office, I cried for days on end. Days. Like the kind that you can't stop if you tried.

This had been the one thing that I had placed everything on. You know, I would be fixed in every way as soon as I had the surgery done. And that just is not reality. The reality is, is I experienced this incredibly horrible thing at an incredibly young age and nothing could ever make up for that experience and nothing would ever make that right or what it had taken from me.

To me, that has always been the most difficult part of my disease is I could take any sort of horrific pain, but it's the mental toll that really does you in. And this part of my life is probably like the darkest I have ever felt, I think.

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Pretty instantly, I had felt a switch in my head and I didn't feel right. I felt very suicidal. I felt I did not really see another way of living because I had put all this weight of a singular surgery, which was somehow, I guess, to make up for the tragedies that have become in my life.

I dropped out of school pretty much instantly because I didn't think I could ever go back and face all these people, my friends. With this failure, I felt like the surgery had been a failure, even though it wasn't, it was very successful. It felt like a failure, I think, one, because mostly I didn't feel more myself, which I thought I would. And it obviously didn't end up fixing everything that I wanted it to.

I didn't let my friends see my face for months. For once, my life was not preoccupied by having to focus on my health.

That had been such a crutch and such a lifeline of having to focus on that and taking care of myself physically that in those times I was just on autopilot. As soon as I would come out of these periods of flare-ups, all of the mental effects would come crashing down on me because they had been built up for all that time. I had not processed any of those emotions before.

And I got hospitalized a couple times and psychiatric wards. And I think it was really frustrating to me because even when I was healthy, I still couldn't be normal and I couldn't live a normal life because I was so plagued by the mental effects just consuming me.

And about two weeks after my surgery, I woke up and I had what I thought was like an eye infection or pink eye or something, but it didn't go away. And it got worse really quickly and it got really painful. And I'd never had anything like it happen before. Initially, they didn't think it was part of my disease, but eventually we did learn that it was and that it was attacking the vision in my left eye.

which two weeks after my surgery, three weeks after, was just another hit. So it got worse and worse. My eye was glued shut, like you could not pry it open for months. And it was awful. I had to lay on one side, keep my eyes closed all the time, and my eye would just weep. And they eventually decided to give me another dose of this treatment I had been doing.

How this treatment does is it kills like basically a whole breed of antibodies in your body. You can't really target specific ones with therapies, at least currently. So you have to kill the whole section to kill this bad ANCA, the bad type. So they decided to give me another dose of this. It didn't do much. And I started to get all these weird mystery pains again. And then out of the ER...

Weirdly enough, looking back, I'm almost grateful that that happened because I was able to focus on taking care of myself in ways I knew how, in ways that were easy for me. And I didn't have to think about my nose. There was much more pressing things. I think it was the week that COVID hit in the U.S., mid-March-ish. I ended up in the hospital again. They had learned that I had then developed an immune deficiency disorder.

So basically, via the treatments, you want to keep killing down your antibodies so the bad ones don't come back. If you do that too much, or sometimes it just happens, they won't come back, any of them, which can be permanent. It can be temporary. It's been about two years now for me. We don't really know if they're going to come back.

And kind of it was a miracle in disguise because my symptoms have been virtually none since I got diagnosed with immune deficiency. It's kept me at a pretty baseline and it's given me a lot more peace of mind because I'm not constantly waiting for the next bomb to drop. It's gotten me to feel as normal as possible. And unfortunately, since I was diagnosed the week of COVID, I have to be a lot more careful.

And now every week I have to give myself infusions. So I have to plug myself up with needles and replace the antibodies that I'm missing. But it's a lot more tolerable for me. So for the past couple of years, I've more just focusing a lot on trying to recover. I've been in and out of school. I tried to go back fall of 2020 and thought that I would be fine. But the reality was, is I had a lot of trauma that had been festering that I hadn't dealt with.

It started to manifest in ways it hadn't before. And I started to struggle again in my mental health. And so I eventually decided to come home again. And I've been in a place where I've just been trying to heal. I had been in this constant fighting mode for years that I felt like I just have needed to sit still and sit with it, focus on myself and know what I want to do and who I want to be.

I think a lot of my experience in my form of coping has been trying to make something positive out of these horrible situations. And that's often not possible in life. I honestly think it can be sometimes damaging to your story and to yourself. I don't like when people try to project positivity onto my story.

I would have told you that it's made me a better person and it's made me strong and it's given me a sense of understanding of the world. But I find myself craving a sense of innocence often to what I thought was taken from me, to feeling such a dark heaviness at such a young age.

People will look at you and not understand how you go through certain things. And I'll have people that say, oh, I don't know how you do that. I don't know how you can go on. But the common denominator is you often don't have a choice in life. And I was unfortunately dealt this awful hand. And we really don't have those skills until we have to, until that moment.

Not many people get the chance to have three faces. There was the me before I got sick. There was the me while I had the facial deformity. And then there was the me after. And it's almost like I see myself in these different stages as different people.

I look at pictures of myself in both of those stages. I don't recognize them. I look at things I did. I look at memories. I can't really associate myself with them because they feel like a different person to me, which is kind of sad because there's also a lot of things I admire about myself in those different stages that I am not now.

I think there was the original me that was the most just trying to get through life, trying to figure out who I was. I grieve parts of her and the normalcy that she had and the opportunities she would have had in life. I see myself with my facial deformity and I think I saw the world as kinder, surprisingly. I had more hope.

There's something almost nostalgic about that version of myself because I'm so protective of her and how much more I wanted for her. And looking back, I am so proud of myself for getting to that place of being self-confident and being very happy with a life that was very hard. And I think that's what I care most about myself in that point. That is still a part of me, even if it feels distant.

Surprising enough, getting my nose fixed was the most traumatizing, probably because it was the least expected. And it's also where this false reality that I'd built up about it being the thing to fix me. I'd built up this idea in my head that sustained me for three years and it all came crashing down in the 30 seconds it took to take the cast off.

But I've also been struggling lately with seeing how differently people treat me now that I am conventionally attractive. Once when I was away at college, I had a guy tell me that I would be, quote unquote, marriage material as soon as my nose was fixed. I didn't get to live without that defining me.

Now that I look normal, people are nicer. More people open the door for me. Men are interested in me. More people want to be my friends.

It's kind of a dark way to see the world of how kinder the world is when you look like everybody else and when you fit this mold. And I get more compliments about things that have nothing to do with my face. People now think I'm funnier. People think I'm smarter. People think I'm stronger. All of these things about me are only because people see me as conventionally attractive.

It's kind of a cruelty. It's a cruel duality to live in where I now have to wonder with every person I meet if they would have treated me the same had they known me back then versus now. It's a different kind of darkness, I think, because I look back and I wanted so much better for that version of me.

She deserves so much more, and I wish she could have received the same kindness and attention and opportunities that I have just because I look a certain way. I think as a woman, from the time we were born, our bodies belong to others before they belong to ourselves.

And that's greatly exasperated my own issues with myself and my body of not feeling like I own the body I live in and somewhat feeling like a fraud. Things don't feel as genuine anymore. I look back, I know that my friends were genuine then. I know that the men who were interested in me were genuine then.

I feel like it's a burden I'm kind of forced to carry of having this kind of distrust of my place in the world. This is not my real face. This is a face that a surgeon carved for me. The only way I've been able to find some peace in that is to tune in to the other ways that make me feel me. Not to love myself, not to hate myself.

I can feel pretty, I can feel ugly, it doesn't matter. And neutrality in that sense has been the only thing that has allowed me to exist in a way that is not consumed by how I look. And has also forced me to get to a place where I am less dependent on surviving off the opinions of others.

I do have the privilege now of having these more conventional looks and exist without being easily picked out from a crowd. And honestly, the masks have helped a lot. It was like the most convenient thing to just be able to put on a mask and nobody has to see my face or my nose and I could just go out and exist as a person.

I think these last couple months of my life have been incredibly helpful to me of being able to sit still and figure out who I want to be and how this story impacts me.

I think a lot of times I felt like I didn't have a choice of how it was going to impact me. But now I'm at a time in my life I get to decide how much of my story gets to be me. And now I can look at my face and I don't see my disease. I don't see a nose job. I just see myself. And I love that. And I love that it's just a face and it doesn't have to be anything else. Today's episode featured Grace Hartman.

You can find out more about Grace on Instagram at Grace A. Hartman, or contact her through email at graceathartman.net. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

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Welcome to the Offensive Line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agarne.

So here's how this show's going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you've got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.