Survivng the World

Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about university life, studying tips and advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.

But this week’s post is something a little different. I’ve been thinking back to a few years ago when I was preparing to have an operation to help me be able to breathe properly. I was born with a cleft lip and palate and I had operations to correct this when I was a kid, then one when I was about 10 to help my palate and the one a few years ago was the last one I’m planning on having for this.

So, as you may be able to imagine I grew up thinking that the scar on and above my lip was more than obvious, and that the droopy side of my nose was the same. I didn’t like these things about myself for the longest time but then slowly, things started to change.

I became proud of them.

They were part of me and it’s not like the scars on my lip and nose are going to go any time soon, even if they’ve corrected the droopy bit. The looks didn’t matter, what mattered was that I could breathe and eat and talk and do everything. I wasn’t being held back in any way by these things, I just struggle with noticing smells sometimes.

The post is called suriving the world because at one point I never thought I’d get to where I am now. I never imagined I could be happy and with someone who doesn’t mind the cleft lip and palate and who loves me for me. I just wanted to survive and eventually not have to go to appointments anymore.

I heard all of the insults from people thinking that they were clever. Then once I had my operation I got all of the nose related jokes, some of them were made by friends and family and made me feel settled and like nothing had changed. And the best part about the whole thing? It took people a while to realise what had changed about my face – while I thought there was this massive change and that my nose suddenly looked better, it turns out people hadn’t seen my nose in the same way I did.

Around that time I was super into writing poetry and I wrote three pieces about this cleft lip and palate journey and the one that sticks with me is that the mirrors and cameras lie. And that’s the point of this post.

If you look in the mirror and see something you don’t like about yourself that you can’t do anything about in the next 5 minutes then chances are people don’t see it in the same way you do. I thought my scar was really noticable and I’ve had people say they can barely see it that day. My advice for suriving the world is to make it your own; take those things that you don’t like and find positives in them, even if that’s just to spite a bully. Make it so that they can’t use these things against you.

If you move with a punch it hurts less than standing still but if you move out of the way then you're not getting hurt at all 

Stay positive, don’t be afraid to be different and don’t forget to be excellent to each other.

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