Autobiography of a Face

by Lucy Grealy

  The beginning of high school was a couple of months away. Each day I checked my face in private, wondering what I would look like by my first day at a new school. I expected to have a second "revising" operation before school started, but as it turned out I would have to wait at least another three months, a span of time that seemed useless and insurmountable. What was the point, if I still had to walk into school that first day looking like this?

  There was only one solution, and that was to stop caring. I became pretentious. I picked out thick books by Russian authors and carted them around with me. Sometimes I even read them. Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, Dead Souls. I read Jude the Obscure simply because I liked the title, and anything else that sounded difficult and deep. Often I missed the subtle nuances of these books, but they presented a version of the world in which honor and virtue and dedication to the truth counted. The stories comforted me, though it didn't escape my attention that these qualities were ascribed primarily to men. The women might be virtuous as well, but their physical beauty was crucial to the story.

  On the first day of school I rode the bus, entered my strange homeroom, and went through my day of classes as invisibly as possible. By now my hair was long, past my shoulders, and I walked around with my head bent, my dark blond hair covering half my face. Having decided against seeking anything as inconsequential as social status, I spent the days observing my peers with a perfectly calibrated air of disinterest. I remained the outsider, like so many of the characters I had read about, and in this role I found great comfort. Doubtless I was more keenly aware of the subtleties of the various dramas and social dances of my classmates than they were themselves.

  For the most part I was left alone. People were a bit more mature, and it was rare that anyone openly made fun of me. But I was still braced for the teasing. Every time I saw someone looking at me, I expected the worst. Usually they just looked the other way and didn't register much interest one way or the other. Then, just as I would start to relax, to let my guard down, some loudmouthed boy would feel a need to point out to his friends how ugly I was.

  One day when I went to my English class, I found a copy of Hesse's Siddhartha, his version of the story of the Buddha, lying on my chair. My notions of Buddhism were sketchy at best, but the opening pages immediately reminded me of the messages of grace, dignity, and light that I'd first encountered in those Christian publications, which had long since ceased arriving in the mail. I'd almost forgotten about my quest for enlightenment, imagining my momentous meeting with the great guru. Now, after so much time and so much loss, I took it as a sign that someone had left this book on my chair. Desire and all its painful complications, I decided, was something I should and would be free of.

  Two months after school started, the long-awaited revision operation was scheduled. I started focusing on the upcoming date, believing that my life would finally get started once I had the face I was "supposed" to have. Logically I knew that this was only one of many operations, but surely it would show promise, offer a hint of how it was all going to turn out.

  When I woke up in recovery the day after the operation, I looked up to see a nurse wearing glasses leaning over me. Cautiously I looked for my reflection in her glasses. There I was, my hair messed and my face pale and, as far as I could tell, looking exactly the same as before. I reached up and felt the suture line. A few hours later, when I was recovered enough to walk unaided to the bathroom, I took each careful step toward the door and geared myself up to look in the mirror. Apart from looking like I'd just gotten over a bad case of flu, I looked just the same. The patch of paler skin was gone, but the overall appearance of my face was no different from before.

  I blamed myself for the despair I felt creeping in; again it was a result of having expectations. I must guard against having any more. After all, I still had it pretty good by global standards. "I have food," I told myself. "I have a place to sleep." So what if my face was ugly, so what if other people judged me for this. That was their problem, not mine. This line of reasoning offered less consolation than it had in the past, but it distanced me from what was hurting most, and I took this as a sign that I was getting better at detaching myself from my desires.

  When I returned to school I had resolved that my face was actually an asset. It was true I hated it and saw it as the cause of my isolation, but I interpreted it as some kind of lesson. I had taught myself about reincarnation, how the soul picks its various lives with the intent of learning more and more about itself so that it may eventually break free of the cycle of karma. Why had my soul chosen this particular life, I asked myself; what was there to learn from a face as ugly as mine? At the age of sixteen I decided it was all about desire and love.

  Over the years my perspective on "what it was all about" has shifted, but the most important point then was that there was a reason for this happening to me. No longer feeling that I was being punished, as I had during the chemo, I undertook to see my face as an opportunity to find something that had not yet been revealed. Perhaps my face was a gift to be used toward understanding and enlightenment. This was all noble enough, but by equating my face with ugliness, in believing that without it I would never experience the deep, bottomless grief I called ugliness, I separated myself even further from other people, who I thought never experienced grief of this depth. Not that I did not allow others their own suffering. I tried my best to be empathic because I believed it was a "good" emotion. But in actuality I was judge and hangman, disgusted by peers who avoided their fears by putting their energy into things as insubstantial as fashion and boyfriends and gossip.

  I tried my best, but for the most part I was as abysmal at seeking enlightenment as I had once been at playing dodge ball. No matter how desperately I wanted to catch that ball, I dropped it anyway. And as much as I wanted to love everybody in school and to waft esoterically into the ether when someone called me ugly, I was plagued with petty desires and secret, evil hates.

  I hated Danny in my orchestra class because I had a crush on him and knew that he would never have a crush on me. Anger scared me most of all, and I repressed every stirring. Every time I felt hatred, or any other "bad" thought, I shooed it away with a broom of spiritual truisms. But the more I tried to negate my feelings, the more they crowded in. I not only harbored hatred for Danny even while I had a crush on him, I also hated Katherine, the girl in orchestra he had a crush on. Trying to repress that feeling, I found myself hating Katherine's cello, of all things, which she played exquisitely well. The cycle eventually ended with me: I hated myself for having even entertained the absurd notion that someone like Danny could like me.

  I didn't begrudge Danny his crush on Katherine. She was pretty and talented, so why shouldn't he want her? I was never going to have anyone want me in that way, so I mustn't desire such a thing; in this way I could be grateful to my face for "helping" me to see the error of earthly desire. This complicated gratitude usually lasted for about five minutes before giving way to depression, plain and simple.

  When my father's insurance money came, and before we learned of the accumulated tax debt we owed, my mother generously kept her promise and bought me another horse. Her registered name was even more silly than Sure Swinger, so I simply called her Mare. I kept her at Snow-cap, a more professional and better-kept stable than Diamond D. There I undertook learning to ride seriously. I fell in love with Mare just as I had with Swinger, and again I had bad luck. Not long after I got her, she broke her leg while turned out in a field. As she limped pathetically onto the trailor to be taken away, they told me they could sell her as a brood mare, but I knew she was too old for this and would be put down shortly. Again my heart was broken, but this time I saw it in much more self-pitying terms. I told myself that anything I loved was doomed, and even as I was aware of my own overblown melodrama, just as I had been that night I nearly collapsed on the hospital floor, I took a strange comfort in this romantic, tragic role.

  Luckily, the owners of Snowcap permi
tted me to continue on at the barn as their exercise rider. This was ideal. Not only did I get to ride horses for free, sometimes as many as six a day, and gain a great deal of experience in the process, but it also gave my life a center. I withstood school all day, knowing I would go straight to the barn afterward and stay there until eight or nine o'clock at night. The barn became the one place where I felt like myself, and I relished the physicality of riding, performing acts I was good at, feeling a sense of accomplishment. I spent as little time at home as possible.

  During tenth grade I had one more operation to work on shaping the free flap, and the results seemed as trivial and ineffectual to me as the last time. The following summer I spent every day with the horses. One day when it was too hot to get very much accomplished, I went along for the ride on an errand with some people from the stable. We got caught in traffic on the main road, and as we crept along at a snail's pace, I looked out the window and got lost in my own world. A bakery storefront, its door set at a very odd angle, caught my attention, reminding me of something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then I remembered that I had been to this town some ten or twelve years earlier with my father. He loved to go out for a drive on a Sunday and explore the area, and Sarah and I loved to accompany him. We'd stand up in the back seat and sing songs with him, songs from his own distant childhood, so familiar and lovely to him that we could both hear that strange, sad. love in his voice as he sang. Unexpectedly, and consciously for the first time since his death, I missed my father.

  The one time I had visited him in the hospital, I had had to wait outside in the hallway briefly. The smells and sounds were so familiar—the sweet disinfectant and wax, always an aroma of overcooked food in the background, the metallic clinks of IV poles as they were pushed along the floor on their stands. Yet I was only visiting, passing through. I had felt alone and without purpose, unidentified, not sure how to act. Now, more than a year after his death, I again didn't know how to act. I didn't want to ignore the grief or even get over it, because that would mean I hadn't loved my father. When my horse died, I had cried almost continuously for days. The loss was pure and uncomplicated. Loving my father had been a different matter. I finally and suddenly found myself consumed with a longing for his presence.

  I started imagining my father standing next to me in the hospital, visiting me. With all my might I strained to hear the background noises of the hospital, feel the starch of the sheets, and hear my father's footsteps approaching, hear the rustle of his clothes as he stood near me, his cough to see if I was awake. I'd imagine opening my eyes very slowly, very carefully, and try to see him, standing beside my hospital bed. All I could conjure was the vaguest of outlines, a passing detail that only seemed to obscure the rest of him: how his watch fitted on his wrist, how he would trace the edge of his ear with one finger.

  Spending as much time as I did looking in the mirror, I thought I knew what I looked like. So it came as a shock one afternoon toward the end of that summer when I went shopping with my mother for a new shirt and saw my face in the harsh fluorescent light of the fitting room. Pulling the new shirt on over my head, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror that was itself being reflected in a mirror opposite, reversing my face as I usually saw it. I stood there motionless, the shirt only halfway on, my skin extra pale from the lighting, and saw how asymmetrical my face was. How had that happened? Walking up to the mirror, reaching up to touch the right side, where the graft had been put in only a year before, I saw clearly that most of it had disappeared, melted away into nothing. I felt distraught at the sight and even more distraught that it had taken so long to notice. My eyes had been secretly working against me, making up for the asymmetry as it gradually reappeared. This reversed image of myself was the true image, the way other people saw me.

  I felt like such a fool. I'd been walking around with a secret notion of promised beauty, and here was the reality. When I saw Dr. Baker a few weeks later, I wanted desperately to ask him what had gone wrong, but I found myself speechless. Besides, I knew that the graft had been reabsorbed by my body—the doctor had warned me it might happen. He spoke of waiting a few years before trying any more big operations, of letting me grow some more. We spoke about a series of minor operations that would make readjustments to what was already there, but there was only vague talk of any new grafts, of putting more soft tissue or bone in place. Sitting in his expensively decorated office, I felt utterly powerless. Realizing I was going to have to change my ideals and expectations was one thing, but knowing what to replace them with was another.

  That unexpected revelation in the store's fitting room mirror marked a turning point in my life. I began having overwhelming attacks of shame at unpredictable intervals. The first one came as I was speaking to Hans, my boss at the stable. He was describing how he wanted me to tide a certain horse. I was looking him in the eye as he spoke, and he was looking me in the eye. Out of nowhere came an intense feeling that he shouldn't be looking at me, that I was too horrible to look at, that I wasn't worthy of being looked at, that my ugliness was equal to a great personal failure. Inside I was churning and shrinking, desperate for a way to get out of this. I took the only course of action I knew I was any good at: I acted as if nothing were wrong. Steadying myself, breathing deeply, I kept looking him in the eye, determined that he should know nothing of what I was thinking.

  That summer I started riding horses for Hans in local schooling shows. In practices I always wore a helmet with my hair hanging loose beneath it, but etiquette required that during shows my hair be tucked neatly up beneath the helmet, out of sight. I put this off until the very last minute, trying to act casual as I reached for the rubber band and hair net. This simple act of lifting my hair and exposing my face was among the hardest things I ever had to do, as hard as facing Dr. Woolf, harder than facing operations. I gladly would have undergone any amount of physical pain to keep my hair down. No one at the show grounds ever commented to me about it, and certainly no one there was going to make fun of me, but I was beyond that point. By then I was perfectly capable of doing it all to myself.

  The habits of self-consciousness, of always looking down and hiding my face behind my hair or my hand, were so automatic by now that I was blind to them. When my mother pointed out these habits to me in the hope of making me stop, telling me they directed even more attention to my face, she might as well have been telling me to change the color of my eyes.

  I fantasized about breakthroughs in reconstructive surgery, about winning the lottery and buying my own private island, about being abducted by space aliens who'd fix me up and plop me back down in the midst of a surprised public. And there were still acts of heroism waiting to be thrust upon me, whole busloads of babies to be saved and at least one, there had to be at least one out there, wise older man who would read about my heroism in the papers, fall in love with my inner beauty, and whisk me away from the annoyance of existence as defined by Spring Valley High School.

  During the eleventh and twelfth grades I had several small operations. The hospital was the only place on earth where I didn't feel self-conscious. My face was my battle scar, my badge of honor. The people in the plastic surgery ward hated their gorgeously hooked noses, their wise lines, their exquisitely thin lips. Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else. If I had my original face, an undamaged face, I would know how to appreciate it, know how to see the beauty of it. Yet each time I was wheeled down to the surgical wing, high on the drugs, I'd think to myself, Now, now I can start my life, just as soon as I wake up from this operation. And no matter how disappointed I felt when I woke up and looked in the mirror, I'd simply postpone happiness until the next operation. I knew there would always be another operation, another chance for my life to finally begin.

  In the wake of my recurring disappointment I'd often chide myself for thinking I'd ever be beautiful enough, good enough, or worthy enough of someone else's love, let alone my
own. Who cared if I loved my own face if no one else was going to? What was beauty for, after all, if not to attract the attention of men, of lovers? When I walked down a street or hallway, sometimes men would whistle at me from a distance, call me Baby yell out and ask me my name. I was thin, I had a good figure, and my long blond hair, when I bothered to brush it, was pretty. I would walk as fast as possible, my head bent down, but sometimes they'd catch up with me, or I'd be forced to pass by them. Their comments would stop instantly when they saw my face, their sudden silence potent and damning.

  Life in general was cruel and offered only different types of voids and chaos. The only way to tolerate it, to have any hope of escaping it, I reasoned, was to know my own strength, to defy life by surviving it. Sitting in math class, I'd look around and try to gauge who among my classmates could have lived through this trauma, certain that none of them could. I had already read a great deal about the Holocaust, but now we were reading first-person accounts by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi in social studies. I was completely transported by their work, and the more I absorbed of their message, the more my everyday life took on a surreal quality. Now everything, everything seemed important. The taste of salt and peanut butter and tomatoes, the smell of car fumes, the small ridge of snow on the inside sill of a barely open window. I thought that this was how to live in the present moment, to resee the world: continuously imagine a far worse reality. At these moments, the life I was leading seemed unimportant, uncomplicated. Sometimes I could truly find refuge in the world of my private senses but just as often I disingenuously affected a posture of repose, using it as a weapon against people I envied and feared, as a way of feeling superior to and thus safe from them.