Body Issues: Nose Edition
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's kinda weird to have a downer post right after I wrote a really chirpy one on how awesome it is to prettify myself, but I did want to point out that I'm not so much an outlier that I escape all the clutches of external pressure that I cannot help.
I don't like my nose. It's too big (my brother says, "it's because our eyes are so small"). It's too rounded without being the cute button-type nose. It's too flat without being that endearing bump.
I don't like my whole profile, period. Most pictures of my profile make me look like I have a flat, smushed-up face so in general, I do my best to face the camera.
When I was a child, I used to wipe my mouth with the palm of my hand going down across my mouth. The logic being that if I wiped my mouth from the side, any dirt would only appear on the other side, but if I wiped down, any dirt would fall off my chin. (I'm not saying I made sense as a child.)
My mother would see this, and she would tell me off, "Don't press your nose down!"
To which I would always reply but she'd never listen, "I'm not pressing my nose down, I'm wiping my mouth."
She would then reach over and pinch my nose and pull it up. "Pull it uuuuppp!" Sometimes she would pinch it really hard and jerk my nose up, and it would really fucking hurt.
I did not rebel to this by squishing my nose down during my rebellious teen years.
Instead, I would envy people with noses that were straight and patrician. I envy Tiara Shafiq's nose, for example. My dad's nose was inherited from his Cantonese mother, and I would watch the Chinese soap operas with those conventionally pretty girls who had those perfect noses and wonder why couldn't I have inherited that instead of my own dumpy nose which got blackheads way too often and large pores.
That superficial piece of bullshit, I internalized it, and I internalized it well.
Fortunately, I'm so busy thinking about other ways of prettifying myself that I usually forget about it.
I don't like my nose. It's too big (my brother says, "it's because our eyes are so small"). It's too rounded without being the cute button-type nose. It's too flat without being that endearing bump.
I don't like my whole profile, period. Most pictures of my profile make me look like I have a flat, smushed-up face so in general, I do my best to face the camera.
When I was a child, I used to wipe my mouth with the palm of my hand going down across my mouth. The logic being that if I wiped my mouth from the side, any dirt would only appear on the other side, but if I wiped down, any dirt would fall off my chin. (I'm not saying I made sense as a child.)
My mother would see this, and she would tell me off, "Don't press your nose down!"
To which I would always reply but she'd never listen, "I'm not pressing my nose down, I'm wiping my mouth."
She would then reach over and pinch my nose and pull it up. "Pull it uuuuppp!" Sometimes she would pinch it really hard and jerk my nose up, and it would really fucking hurt.
I did not rebel to this by squishing my nose down during my rebellious teen years.
Instead, I would envy people with noses that were straight and patrician. I envy Tiara Shafiq's nose, for example. My dad's nose was inherited from his Cantonese mother, and I would watch the Chinese soap operas with those conventionally pretty girls who had those perfect noses and wonder why couldn't I have inherited that instead of my own dumpy nose which got blackheads way too often and large pores.
That superficial piece of bullshit, I internalized it, and I internalized it well.
Fortunately, I'm so busy thinking about other ways of prettifying myself that I usually forget about it.
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