Now, I'm nearing a whole semester of distance from surgery - I'm less than 2 weeks away from getting the braces off, less than 6 weeks away from finishing law school, and less than 4 months away from starting my professional career brace and breathing problem free.
I want to talk about the psychological impact of such surgery. I can't be the only one experiencing this; if I am, I'm horrified and annoyed at myself.
You see, I love my new face. I walk past mirrors and I do a double take. My own mother has started calling me vain (but that's okay, because she's kinda a hypocrite - spends 25 years trying to get me to take my appearance more seriously, then the last 4 months chiding me for staring at the mirrors now). I know I posted before about waiting to have surgery because when I was 15 and everyone in the dental world kept telling me I was aesthetically incorrect because of my jaw deficiency, and thinking if I couldn't find someone to love me for the face I had, I didn't want to be loved, and then I did at 21 and we've been married for 4 years and blah blah blah.
It's all rubbish. I LOVE my new face. And I don't know if it's chewing, or breathing, or balance that has been improved, or some combination thereof, or the fact that I no longer share a nose similar to Severus Snape's, or what, but I didn't even realize that before all this, I didn't FEEL as confident as I could have. I didn't even realize it. I used to dismiss other people's dismissals as, oh, my personality, or oh, I'm just not in the same realm as, or oh, whatever. I'm not even sure this makes sense. Granted, I wouldn't go through any of this had my bite not been off, the nose and sinuses not been off, etc etc, but...
I have gone dancing four times this spring. I now LOVE dancing. I dance like I just don't give a sesame... and I don't. I don't care. I feel great, I enjoy it, and I feel confident doing so. I see people react to me differently, I see myself reacting differently, thinking differently.
I swear to god, I am not joking, but this whole department at my future work who I never hit it off with (NOT the department I am going to) is now suddenly my new best friend... you know, that section at work that has a fratty feel to it, the good ol' boy network? I'm in it now. It's freaky. And, on two separate occasions, mind you this is in the first few months after surgery, I've caught some guy literally sticking his head out the window of his truck to turn and look at me (this is so machoismo Texas to me, it kills me).
I'm not even sure if it's that I'm more "attractive" after, as much as it is that I will never again have to go to a new dentist and listen to their schpeal on how I should have jaw surgery or what the hell did my orthodontist do to me as a child to have this be the end result. It's knowing I'm done, that I'm "normal" now, that I won't be judged for it any more.
Someone mentioned in another post (I forget where) about how this surgery is much more influential on our lives than say just plain braces, because we continue to talk about it months and months before and after. That's so true, and I think it's because we are changing something we've seen every day, and like it or not, have been judged on every day. It's like waking up and someone says "OH! just kidding! You've looked just like your father for the last 25 years, but you had some hidden glamour on you and this is what you REALLY look like!"... At least, that's how I feel. It's odd, but I think the face I see in the mirror now is more like the image of myself I saw in day dreams than my original face was. That's fundamentally freaky, if you think about it.
So, for all of you, wherever you are in the process, wherever it is taking you, or will take you, or has taken you, I wish you luck. May your end result allow you to dance like you don't care who is watching, and may you be called vain by your hypocritical mothers as well for enjoying and knowing the face that you look at in the mirror. May you like your face as much as I like mine.
/end rant.
