A Normal Face.

I've been working at Operation Smile for a little over a month now, and each day that I'm there I learn something new and exciting. My afternoons there are spent inputting data and looking at pictures of people with cleft lips, cleft palates, and other facial deformities. At first the pictures (especially the pre-surgery and surgical ones) really got to me and made me a tad sick to my stomach, but I've thankfully been able to condition myself to see that as a new "normal" of sorts. Eventually all the cleft lips start to run together and I often lose track of which patient I'm working on and have to do some major back tracking to be sure I haven't messed up.

Since working at Operation Smile I have become ever grateful of my smile, granted it's a bit crooked and not as white as it could be, but I've realized a major plus: it's a normal, average-jane smile. My smile has never caused me to be bullied and tormented, or kept me from being able to speak and eat correctly, never caused me any physical of emotional pain either. And to think that I still look in the mirror, or in photographs, and go "I hate my smile." I literally want to kick myself in the teeth when I think that. I spend hour after hour staring at pictures of kids and adults alike who would never have the opportunity to lead a normal life if they didn't have surgery provided by this awesome organization. Its a really beautiful and fulfilling thing to look at the post-op photo from a week later and be able to already see a difference, and be able to imagine how immensely their life will change because of this.

Human kind is extremely vain and superficial, its all about what on the outside and how gorgeous we are compared to everyone else. I'm beginning to rethink that ideology. Are looks really what matters? Today I had pictures of a young kid who not only had a cleft lip, but his whole face was deformed. My heart broke into a million tiny pieces. He has so much life ahead of him and unfortunately no amount of plastic surgery would be able to make him look "normal" and "beautiful" to other people (and probably not even to himself). But then I realized, how often to I think I'm not beautiful? A lot. I have no scares, no deformities, just a dusting of acne on my cheeks and skin that's a little too oily for my tastes. This young guy really put things into perspective for me...Beauty is what WE define it to be. Beauty doesn't have to mean anorexic supermodels in lingerie, it can be that little boy covered in scares if we so decide. Think about it, how skewed is today's society's view of beauty? How should we redefine it?