There were students in the class who were naturally gifted, who wouldn’t need a reference photo or outline to guide their creations. J introduced herself, then asked us to state our names and what we were most looking forward to learning. She wore beautiful, bright colors and taught us about artists and movements I had never heard of and encouraged us to explore what art meant to us both collectively and as individuals. She had a laugh so loud it echoed down the corridor. My art teacher that year was a woman named Ms.
By the time Zan and I were eighteen, we’d each undergone over sixty surgical procedures to alter what we looked like. We’d have surgery, recover, and return for more pictures, more circling, and more detailing of every flaw. We would sit and let them pick apart our every imperfection, and we wanted it, we did. They would pinch and poke, circling our flaws. We would sit in a room while doctors took pictures of our faces from every angle. Some of it was for medical purposes, other times for aesthetics. There were regular appointments with doctors and surgeons trying to fix me and my twin sister, Zan, who was also born with the condition. My jaw was too far back, my ears too low. My eyes were too far apart and too crooked, my nose too big. It comes with the territory of being born with a facial difference as a result of Crouzon syndrome-a rare craniofacial disorder where the bones in the head fuse prematurely. He continued poking me in the shoulder with his pencil, but I said nothing.Īt twelve years old, I was already used to people identifying my flaws and commenting on my ugliness.
“It’s not like you could get much uglier. “I’m going to stick my pencil through the back of your eye,” he told me, laughing. Or so I was told by the boy who sat behind me the first day of seventh-grade art class. There’s a mathematical equation to prove it.