Small Things Like Big Noses

A mash-up of bad plastic surgery and face blindness

Recently, I’ve seen a few episodes of the show “Botched” on YouTube. It’s reality-based, and it follows people who have had bad plastic surgery and are getting it fixed by the surgeons on the show. It’s sensational and a bit funny, but it’s also interesting from both a curiosity standpoint and a human nature one.

One common theme I noticed among some of the participants is how their appearance affected their lives. These are some things said by patients on the episodes I’ve seen:

I can’t go on dates and look for a life partner because of my bad implants.

I have to cover my nose when I go out, so I try not to go anywhere

I can’t move out of my parents’ house and find a job until my nose is fixed.

And so on.

Some of these people had deformities caused by bad corrections of birth defects or injuries. Some had simply tried to make themselves “look better,” and that failed. But what struck me was that none of them were actually confined to the house due to their noses or other imperfections. They had functional bodies and brains. What kept them confined to their homes, or their parents’, was in their heads and not on their faces or under their shirts.

There was a lot of talk on the show about giving people their lives back after the surgeries, which is, of course, a noble feat. But in reality, their deformities or imperfections were never directly responsible for these people staying home and living stunted lives. It was their thoughts about themselves that did it.

While on the surface, the corrective surgeries seemed to cure their woes, I wonder if this sort of thing “sticks.” Since it was the patients’ beliefs about their bodies that kept them from living their best lives, do they actually leave their self-consciousness behind? Or do they simply find another thing to be self-conscious about?

Honestly, the show, at times, made me sad. The 32-year-old woman who had never started her own life because her nose was crooked really caught my attention. So much of her precious, short time on Earth was spent hiding in her room because of a crooked nose that I could barely notice.

Maybe my perspective on this is skewed because I have partial face blindness. This means I have difficulty recognizing people and telling the difference between people’s faces. If I know people well and see them regularly, I usually do fine, but I have been in many awkward or downright embarrassing situations because I do not recognize someone who recognizes me.

So many facepalms. Photo by tabitha turner on Unsplash

Once, when I was out of town to work a special event, I ran into a gentleman I thought was a co-worker at the check-in desk. It was only after a whole conversation (“Oh, you’re in this hotel too? Awesome! I’m in room 301”) that I realized the person I thought he was would not have a different company’s shirt on. I was mortified, but later had a laugh with my roommate over the fact that I basically invited a strange man to my hotel room (thankfully, he did not show up).

For a long time, because I work at home and generally see the same people, I had so few issues with face blindness that I pretty much forgot I had it. Sure, I couldn’t (and still can’t) recognize my dental hygienist, but she knows who I am, so that generally works out. Can anyone recognize people who have masks and caps on? (I know, you probably can, you fancy people.)

But now I spend a lot of time at a pool with young synchronized swimmers. I help coach a novice team and fill in wherever people need me. My daughter swims three days a week, and I enjoy helping and learning.

But I do not enjoy trying to figure out who is who.

Sometimes these swimmers have swim caps on. Their hair might be wet, it might be dry, or it might be somewhere in between. Sometimes they have goggles and swimsuits on and other times, shirts and shorts. At meets, they wear make-up and have their hair slicked into a bun with Knox,making it dark and shiny.

This entire situation puts me at a severe disadvantage.

It’s taken me a long time to learn who is who in all (or most) states of hair and dress, and to attach names to the correct face when it’s really, really hard for me to recognize their faces at all. After a couple of years, I do pretty okay now. There’s a girl or two whose faces I’m still working on with their caps on, but I’ve basically got it. I have asked my daughter a lot of questions about who was who, and she’s very patient about it. She understands that I really want to learn ways to differentiate girls who have similar builds and coloring, so she helps me out. “Cindy’s hair is curlier. Leslie has lighter eyes.” And so on.

For a long while, I had a huge problem with two moms who looked, to me, very much alike. They were of similar height, and had similar body frames and coloring. They both wore their hair in smooth ponytails a lot of the time. Their kids even looked alike. I found it extremely frustrating that I couldn’t tell them apart.

One day, I had the opportunity to sit and talk to them for about 20 minutes. They sat next to each other, and I was across from them. There were a few other people there who carried the conversation while I flitted my eyes back and forth, comparing their features until I could see the differences. Finally, I could tell that one had a slightly broader face, and the other had a stronger chin. I used the differences in specific features as cues to who was who until eventually, over time, their entire faces looked different to me, and I realized that they didn’t actually look that similar at all. I think I saw them at least once a week over the course of a year before they looked like different people to me. It was quite the process.

And then, when I had it figured out, I had the strangest experience. One of them walked past me in the locker room. I saw her reflection in the mirror. I knew who she was, and I felt pretty good about that. Then, when she walked past, I saw the side of her face in the mirror. It was like a switch flipped. I no longer recognized her at all. It stunned me. But I’d only memorized her face from the front and not from the side.

My brain is a weird place.

Imagine that there are people who stay in their house all day, every day, because they are embarrassed about their noses. And here I am, unable to recognize their face without it.

What’s the moral of my story today? Besides the part where I am just really weird, of course. I think it’s just that we let stupid stuff hold us back a lot of the time. Bent noses, crooked teeth, whatever, these things are surface stuff that we sometimes allow to overly influence the way we interact with the world. And that’s bad.

Don’t miss out on big, awesome things because of small things like big noses. Someone like me might not even see your nose, but we’d sure miss the rest of you.

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