Resting Bitch Face
The featured picture on this post was taken two months ago (by the phenomenal Amanda Elmore). I like it for many reasons, not least being that it looks like me and is also pretty. Not all my pics come out that way.
I think sometimes I look pretty and sometimes I don’t, which doesn’t bother me much. What is upsetting is lingering damage from botched surgeries invariably caught on camera. Whether I’m smiling for a still shot or talking expressively on video, certain flaws become apparent—surgical flaws versus my own natural imperfections. Due to this I tend to default to expressionless on camera. This has led to the discovery of my awesomely classic “resting bitch face.”
I’ve probably had one most my life. An old high school friend recently mentioned thinking I was a raging bitch when we met, purely because my mind was elsewhere and my face a blank. (For the record, freshman year was not exactly a joyful time…I’m just saying). In pictures from later years, I’m smiling plenty—my late-teens to mid-20s, when I drank daily. I tended to be a happy drunk (until I wasn’t…feel free to read the book for more on that), but once I got sober I struggled with depression for a long time.
I got sober in 1997 and didn’t smile with any frequency until 2011. That’s the year things fell into place for me creatively and financially. My writing was starting to fire and a business I’d started was going gangbusters. I could finally afford to correct a botched surgery from 2009 and when it appeared to have gone well I had another surgery on my nose, in 2012. What I thought would be a minor rhinoplasty to smooth out a faint ridge in my bridge, was so badly botched I spent the next five years trying to fix it. I haven’t come close.
Long story short, my nose collapsed and then had to be rebuilt (more than once). It’s still swollen and somewhat shapeless, though it may (or may not) continue to subside and regain its once lovely shape. The bigger issue is nerve damage in my right cheek, sustained somewhere along the ling during one of the five aforementioned surgeries. It prevents me from smiling correctly and is permanent.
I’ve never liked having my picture taken. When I was buzzed or high, I felt uninhibited, beautiful, and glamorous, but otherwise I was self-conscious on camera. I look back now and think my former camera shyness was probably absurd, but while I’m no longer insecure, the self-consciousness returned when the surgical damage occurred. It is what it is, but that doesn’t mean I want it recorded for posterity on strangers’ iPhones. (I’d like to believe, neither would they.)
