What an awful prompt. Do not make me take a Selfie!
I have a horrible smile; I have a wonky lip that makes me appear to have a permanent sneer. My teeth are awful, naturally yellow, now worsened by a lifetime of drinking my coffee black. I do have a white stripe across the middle of my two front teeth, but that serves only to show up the yellow (apparently my poor enamel is a result of Measles when I was very young.) I have missing teeth, such that the gap is visible when I smile, and a mis-aligned jaw that gives me an overbite that can only be corrected by some quite drastic surgery.
Don’t get me wrong, I would have had the surgery like a shot, had I known about it. I was quite late in life before I learned that my Orthodontal Surgeon had recommended the procedure back in my school days. I wore braces for years, even though he had told my mother that it wouldn’t work. The pain! The proper solution, as he advised, would have been to take a wedge of thigh bone out, and to insert it into my jaw in order to bring it forward and correct the alignment of my teeth. It would have meant 6 weeks with my jaw wired up, and on a liquid diet.
Despite being fully informed of probable/inevitable future issues with both my teeth and my digestion, she wouldn’t give consent. Nobody asked me. Nobody told me of the possibilities.
If only I could have been fixed in just six weeks. If only I hadn’t had to endure braces, the pain, the teasing, for years. If only I could have avoided the years of being taunted with the “Goofy” label. (If only I could have lost the puppy fat on that liquid diet!) I might have looked okay. I might have been the one that the boys liked, instead of baiting. I might not have been condemned at that modelling school that our mother dragged us off to. They accepted my twin, but rejected me, and called me “horribly unphotogenic.” In front of me: “We’ll take this one, but not that one… she’s horribly unphotogenic.”
I didn’t care about the modelling thing, I would have hated that course, but it was just another label, just another instance of being compared unfavourably to my twin, and it left me with a complex about cameras and mirrors that persists to this day.
My horrible smile and my horrible mouth are planted in a horrible body.
I hate mirrors, and I hate selfies. I do not enjoy looking at myself, at all. You can’t make me, and I won’t do it.
You know, I would love to say that I am smiling as I write this, that it is all a little tongue in cheek, but I am not, and it isn’t, really, even if that was my intention when I sat down to write. I am actually feeling a little tearful. I have developed emotional callouses over the years, I am usually able to say “I don’t care” – yet, every now and again, I am back there, being judged on something as shallow as appearance, and I end up feeling less than I know myself to be.
Now, how do I take an image for this response? A photo of the back of my head? I really do not know. I have used a generated image for now.
How about an update on “fur“? Mr L made a furry friend today and managed to get a tickle or two of its fur. I tried to take a photo of the two of them but he moved, and the cat ran.
This cat was the closest thing that I saw to wildlife today 😉