An elephant, a school bus, the state of California – these are all things that I like to compare the size of my nose to. It sometimes feels as if my nose is so big that if you were to take a picture from outer space with one of those super expensive satellites, you would be able to see it all the way down here from earth.
Of course, my friends and boyfriend don’t agree with me, and of course, they call me dramatic because of the way I feel about my nose, but at the end of the day it’s me, and not them, who sees a big old honker staring back whenever I look in the mirror.
There are a lot of things that I don’t necessarily love about my body, but for the longest time, my nose was one that I desperately wanted to change. Some of the other things that I wanted to alter about myself, like my body weight and hair color, are things that I can physically change. I can work out more, and I can dye the color of my hair. However, with my nose, there isn’t much I can do about the size of it. Sure I can use makeup to contour it to make it look smaller, but there isn’t anything permanent that I can do easily to make it smaller. My feelings of self-consciousness about my nose grew so much that all throughout the first two years of my college experience I was convinced that I wanted a nose job.
One day, however, I was scrolling through some old photos on my phone and I stopped to look at my high school graduation pictures, specifically, one of my grandpa and I. I stopped, zoomed in a little bit to our faces, and that’s when I noticed it. My Grandpa and I have the same exact big, wide, huge nose.
I was stunned by the fact that our two noses were almost identical (the way that genetics works is crazy, am I right?) and I was also stunned by the fact that I’ve never NOSE-ticed (haha sorry I love puns) the fact that they were so similar.
I love my grandpa. He is my absolute best friend. He was born on September 12, and my birthday is September 15, so he calls me his late birthday present (cue waterworks). We’re similar in so many ways. I got my love and passion for writing from him. When he was younger and still living in Cali, Colombia, he wrote poems for a newspaper, and now I am majoring in journalism. He also used to write short stories, and now I am currently working on a short teen novel. He played soccer all throughout his life, and I played soccer when I was younger. He is such a selfless person and loves helping as many people as he can, and I hope to even be half as amazing as he is one day.
And apparently, another thing we also have in common is…our nose size. Once I made this revelation, I immediately went to look at photos of my mom and I and noticed that we both also have the same nose as my grandpa.
As soon as I realized this, I kind of smiled to myself and thought about how neat it was that this huge, ole honker of a nose has been passed down three generations. It was at that moment that I kind of fell in love with my nose. Sure it’s huge, and sure I still feel self-conscious about it from time to time, but I no longer want to change it.
Whenever I look in a mirror I still see a huge nose staring back at me, but now I see a huge nose staring back at me that reminds me of my grandpa, my mom, and the bond that the three of us share. Whenever I look at it I now think of my grandpa and the love that I have for him, and how thankful I am to have him in my life.