You think you can hurt my feelings? My orthodontist once told me he would start calling me ‘Jack’ because my teeth were so “jacked up.” I had another orthodontist classify me as a dental abnormality. For my entire life, I’ve been incredibly insecure about the way my teeth look and taking school pictures growing up was agony. “Smile with your teeth,” my mom would say on picture day, and let me tell you, every time I did those pictures turned out to make me look so incredibly uncomfortable. My dental history is a mess, to say the least, and it was such a long process—having multiple spacers to widen my palette and enough extractions that I lost count— that I didn’t even get my braces on until halfway through my sophomore year of high school. The four years that followed had profound effects on my self-image, as well as my perception of beauty standards altogether.
Over the years, I grew accustomed to mouth pain and made close friends with my dental hygienists, who never failed to compliment my outfits or check in on how school was going. Even with support (and a substantial amount of Advil), however, having braces still had some pretty intense effects on my self-esteem. Listen, everyone knows that having braces is hard, and it’s not like I was ever really bullied for it (luckily enough), but even now that I finally have them off, I still find myself naturally smiling without teeth in pictures and covering my mouth with my hand when I laugh— habits I created in elementary school when I first stopped feeling “pretty.” I hated looking at pictures of me, and I had myself pretty much convinced that I was some undesirable creature. As sad as that sounds, it makes a lot of sense that I would feel that way, I mean, every two weeks my orthodontist would tell me one more thing that was wrong with me.
I didn’t fully understand the depth of my insecurity, though, until I moved away for college a year ago. Every one of my new friends at school would constantly tell me how pretty they thought I was, particularly how much they liked my smile. I was shocked at that, and still have a hard time finding a comfortable way to respond; for as long as I can remember, it’s just been a given that I don’t have a nice smile, or at least I thought. I received compliments from friends and family on a lot of other (more important) things about me, but my smile was never one of them. So, when I suddenly was thrust into an environment of people who hadn’t grown up looking at the evolution of my smile as a gradual process, but rather of people who saw me close to the end of my orthodontia journey, I found that every problem I ever had with the shape of my jaw, the crookedness of my teeth, the intensity of my overbite, and the childlike look of the braces themselves was invisible to everyone but me.
This realization has pulled my self-image from the trenches where I’d buried it so long ago back into the light, and it just goes to show that beauty standards are irrelevant, beauty itself is subjective, and no one else is paying as much attention to your imperfections as you are.