Autobiography Of A Face

"Lucy Grealy tells her story: childhood cancer, endless surgical reconstructions, and the pain of facial disfigurement in an unkind world.<br/><br/>My experience is nowhere near Lucy’s — but going into Moh’s surgery for a skin cancer tumor on my lower eyelid — it was actually quite terrifying as we didn’t know how much of my face they would have to take — didn’t know how deeply rooted the carcinoma was. In the end, my lower left eyelid was reconstructed by cutting the skin at the left corner of my left eye, and stretching the skin over. My recovery wasn’t too bad, and overall my experience is hardly comparable to Lucy’s. But there’s that haunting likelihood it will come back — and who knows what it could take next, or how much. <br/><br/>A face is wrapped up in identity in a way the rest of the body isn’t. People were so cruel to her — I hope that heartless audacity is less likely today. It is strange how much physical beauty determines your worth to the outside world. I’ve experienced this weird external valuation on and off for refusing to align myself with beauty standards. Sporting hairy legs, I once got in an argument with a perfect stranger — “you’re a cute girl otherwise, why would you do that to yourself?” And here’s the real kicker - I was in a relationship, so why did I have to be attractive to the rest of the world? Why did I have to be attractive to this old man, and why did it anger him so much that I wasn’t? Why do married people have to still be aesthetically attractive to any stranger on the street? Physical beauty is oddly much more than sexual attraction, yet I couldn’t give a good reason why. <br/><br/><br/>Thank you, Lucy, for sharing your story."