“I would never change that about myself.”

“The Roman gods had the power to change form whenever they wanted. What’s one thing about yourself that you’d never want to change?” My nose. For a long time, I was embarrassed by my nose. It’s big and bulbous. And I was always embarrassed by it. I thought – you know, and it has all these blackheads on it. And it has this little line of blackheads too, right above the bulbous part, on the, like, straight part that, like, cuts it. With little like – it’s very noticeable. It was very noticeable when I was a teenager, not as noticeable now, and my family used to call it the equator. And I was so embarrassed by it, so embarrassed by it. And then my wela died and I was very – it was very sad. It was a hard time for me. You know, I had moved out of my parents’ house my senior year into her home to help her. She was going through dialysis, and it was… It was hard. We were very close. And we went to – up to Michigan. I think it was, like, that next summer. And I had talked to some of my – some of her relatives, my relatives, her sister specifically [name], who is still living, and we talked about my nose – and they call it up there, her sisters call it a strawberry nose because not only does my wela have it, but all of her sisters have it. It’s a [family name] nose, they call it a strawberry [family name] nose. Because it’s bulbous like a strawberry and it has the little black dots, very typical [family name] nose. This made me feel so connected to her. You know, I feel bad for people who have, like, this body dysmorphia where they need to utilize plastic surgery to change these things about themselves. Because as a person who’s loved by her family and who loves her family, I can look in the mirror and look at certain features on my body and say, “That I got from this person, that I got from this person.” And it feels good. It just feels right. And it’s comforting knowing that she’s still alive in me. Not only in her stories and her memory and her morals, but like in my appearance ’cause I look so much like her. So, I would never change that about myself.

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