My Big Nose (Sydney Salter)

When I was fourteen years old, my dad's new girlfriend took me to a plastic surgeon, thinking that a nose job would make me beautiful. The surgeon said that I was too young. The next one did too.

That was the moment that I found out that I had a big nose. 

Obviously I spent my high school years feeling insecure about my nose. I hated getting my photo taken. I thought that my big nose was the reason that my biggest crush didn't like me back. I yearned for a nose job.

The nose job that I got when I turned eighteen added a bump to my nose. 

But I didn't look much different overall. No one seemed to notice that my nose had changed. But I felt different inside--a hard-earned lesson. My nose had never been the problem, my lack of confidence was the issue. 

I headed off to college with my big nose, its new bump, and the knowledge that confidence comes from within, not from superficial things like beauty. 

All of my adult life I have spent a lot of time reading, thinking and writing about beauty standards and self worth. I wrote my first novel My Big Nose And Other Natural Disasters to explore the idea of giving a fictional character more agency than I possessed as an insecure teenager. 

Now I'm enjoying being an older woman, and the freedom of being less objectified as a result. I understand more about the personal wounds and societal pressures that caused my dad's new girlfriend (now my stepmom) to try to help me meet societal beauty standards. I don't like what happened and I wish I'd left my big nose alone, but we live in a world that makes it really difficult to be a woman who doesn't adhere to the ever-changing, always fleeting notions of what it means to be beautiful.