New Face, Who Dis?

Fun fact: I love showing people side by side comparisons of my face pre and post op. Everyone’s reactions are always hilarious and they always say something like “You look so good now!…not that you looked bad before…but wow!” Unless you’re my little brother who tells me I was ugly then and am still ugly now. He keeps me humble.

The left picture was taken in December 2015, after my first consultation for the surgery, but before the braces. The second picture was taken in November 2017, the day my braces came off. I’m laughing at the fact that I’m wearing the same J.Crew vest because that was definitely not on purpose.

I wanted to make this post about the recent identity crisis I’ve been having since I had my double jaw surgery. My friends and family will ask me all the time if I get freaked out when I look in the mirror or if I miss the way my face used to look. And the answer is yes…but also no.

Since I got my jaw surgery, I’ve been struggling with this identity crisis. I look at old pictures of myself and I don’t like what I see. Mainly this is because my pre-op face was so different to what I look like now. I never disliked my appearance before the surgery, I just knew I was going through a transformation. I knew that facial structure at the time wasn’t going to last for a long time. But now I look at pictures of myself from before my surgery and wonder to myself if I’m that same girl.

Don’t get me wrong…I think this entire experience is so cool. How awesome is it that God has given me two faces in one lifetime? One of my good friends explained it once to me that I look like my own hotter older sister. (I don’t have a sister FYI). Thats very flattering. I joke with my friends that I have completely disassociated myself from the girl I was before “I got my face fixed”. Its almost like a clean slate in my own mind.

“Hey Kim, do you remember when you wore this…” No sorry, that was someone else. “Hey girl do you remember when you went crazy over this guy….” Nope, sorry I think you have me mistaken with a girl with an underbite. “Yo Kim, remember that time you..”. NO. WRONG PERSON. NOT ME.

Of course, you don’t need major face surgery to feel this way.

A bunch of my friends have started spelling my name with a “Y” now because a new face clearly needs a new name. My name now autocorrects to “Kym” in their phones. I’m pretty sure this was my idea before I even got the surgery, I’m just surprised it stuck.

This may be because I just took Art History, but it feels like the last few years of my life I have become a giant blob of marble; constantly getting molded and sculpted into a piece of fine art.(Thats an ambitious thought isn’t it?) Its like my orthodontist and surgeon are Donatello or Michelangelo with a chisel.

I went into surgery and my surgeon chipped off some of my chin, made my nose smaller and moved my face forward. Post surgery, the sculpture got thinner and more structured as I lost weight and my swelling decreased. A few weeks ago, my orthodontist chipped of my braces because that look was a little too superfluous for the message this sculpture represents and were no longer needed or desired (and for that I am thankful).

There are some days I will look at a picture of myself and be like “holy cow-thats me now”. Its not meant to sound conceited, it just comes as a shock. You spend everyday of your life looking in the mirror or at pictures of yourself and you get so used to it. What if one morning you woke up and it was significantly different?

Looking at old pictures, I would always think “that was you! That was how people viewed you and thats the face you put make up on everyday and you took a million pictures like that and this is how you grew up and this was what you were used to and  this is how people in your life first knew you and met you. Where is that girl now?”

I remember looking at myself for the first time after surgery in the camera of my dad’s phone. I remember feeling so excited to see what I looked like, and I wasn’t completely shaken up by the fact that my face was rounder or my nose was smaller. But then a few hours later, I got up to go to the bathroom and I was absolutely horrified when I looked in the mirror because of all the swelling.  It looked like my face had gained 50 pounds. That was truly terrifying. I had no idea who the bloated tomato face in the mirror was, but it couldn’t be me. I tried looking for aspects of myself I recognized. Things like “blonde hair”, “flat eyebrows”, and  “bug eyes”. But one of my main physical aspects (my long chin) was gone now.

During the summer I was so unhappy with my appearance. Yes, I understand I was recovering and my face had undergone major trauma. But that was yet another period where I was waiting for change. The same way that I would go to the orthodontist for 14 months to get my braces changed and to move my jaws forward and out, I tried to adapt to a major physical change and learn to be content with it.

And I can’t stress enough that it is not like I hated my appearance before. Before I even knew I had to get the surgery, I was pretty content with my face. “It is what it is”. But when I started this process, I knew I was going to change. My orthodontist even told me the first day I would look different by the time this was over, and I had to learn to be okay with that. I had mixed feelings about it because I kept thinking “what if I look worse?”, “what if I like my face with the underbite and long face?”  While this surgery would help me physically, I had a lot of anxieties and concerns that I never thought I would have.

In the past I would hate pictures where my chin stuck out. I remember that upon meeting people, one of my differentiating factors was my long face. I didn’t think I was unattractive; I thought more of the fact that I knew that there was a problem that had to be fixed. Now that it is fixed, my confidence has definitely increased.  I think part of that comes from the drastic change and the excitement that comes from that. But also, knowing that this is technically what my face was supposed to look like from the very beginning helps make me feel normal. It brings me such peace of mind to know my jaws are perfectly aligned now, just like everyone else.

Probably one of the funniest things to happen to me during this entire post-surgery recovering happened when I was working on campus. At the beginning of the semester, I saw this girl who I used to RA with two years ago (before this surgery process began). I said hi on the first day at work, but she acted a little cold towards me. I didn’t think anything of it. A few weeks later, she told me “You know you look a lot like my friend Kim”. I was like… okay… I guess this girl has a lot of friends. I remember thinking “There is no way I’m that unrecognizable”. But sure enough, a few weeks after that, this girl pulls up my own Facebook profile picture, looks me in the eye and says “This is the girl I think you look like”. I laughed so hard. When I told her that was actually me and I had jaw surgery over the summer, she didn’t believe me. She had assumed I was an underclassmen because I lost so much weight and my face looked younger. This is literally so hilarious to me and now we joke about this all the time at work.

So it goes two ways: to some people, I don’t look any different to them. To others, I can pass as a totally different person. And it is the same in my own head. Oh theres the old Kim or Omg who is that girl lol I don’t know her. But the overall message of this post is: I am so happy with the way I look now. The surgery was totally worth it. I think it is so cool that I look drastically different than I did a year ago. And while faces change and major surgeries happen, its really our experiences that change us on the inside. Sometimes your outside changes can reflect your inner changes, but that is not always in direct correspondence with each other.

I think that we constantly change and evolve year after year. Who I was when I was in 8th grade is different than when I was a junior in high school and a sophomore in college. Our experiences change us and mold us. And we can cut our hair or get piercings or change our style and lose some weight or gain weight and all of that- but faces don’t normally change, do they?

I have changed a lot in the last two years, and its cool that my face reflects any sort of change at all. But as much as I joke about how different I am, how I have changed and how I am a totally different person, I am still Kim. I don’t necessarily know what that entails, but that may just be because I’m a girl in my twenties. I don’t have it figured out, but thats not necessarily a bad thing at the moment.

When I sit down and think about it, I realize I still like most of the same things, have most of the same friends and have kept generally the same morals since the beginning of this process. I have definitely learned a lot in those two and a half years, and have done things I never expected to do (going to Europe and starting a blog are two of the big ones). And while a natural and gradual change happens to everyone over time, I can confidently say I have improved myself in the last few years. I like to think my “new face” reflects that in the best way. And as my swelling continues to go down (that’s right, theres still some swelling that will decrease overtime) I am excited for this new chapter in my life and for the rest of my life where I will continue to change and grow.

Did I just end this on a really corny note? Oops, my bad.

If you’re reading this and you’re planning on getting the surgery, or have already gotten it, I hope my Kim thoughts have shed some light on all of this “identity crisis”. Please feel free to comment below if this spoke to you in any way.

Thanks for reading! xx