For as long as I could remember, people had mocked my nose.
It started in middle school.
“Here comes the beak!” the boys would shout whenever I entered the classroom.
The girls left drawings of witches on my desk, and someone even wrote across the mirror in the locker room:
“Emily, no boy will ever love you.”
Over the years, I learned to pretend I couldn’t hear them.
I learned to pose only from the side in photographs, tilt my head while speaking, and avoid store windows so I wouldn’t accidentally catch my own reflection.
Then I met Michael.
He was the first man who looked directly at my face without turning away.
“You’re beautiful,” he would tell me. “You don’t need to change anything.”
We got married and spent eight years together. Michael never mocked me or made me hide from photographs. But the voices from my childhood still lived inside my head.
Whenever my coworkers took a group photo, I pretended to be sick.
