I Took My Appearance For Granted. Then My Face Changed — And My Life Transformed Overnight.

In a world obsessed with appearance, it’s easy to let our physical differences define us. For years, I lived under the comforting umbrella of stereotypical beauty — unaware of the journey that awaited me. But in 2019, at the age of 25, my life took an unexpected turn overnight when I underwent brain surgery to remove a tumor. During the surgery I suffered a stroke, which left me unable to walk or write, and with the sensation that the world is constantly moving.

Due to nerve damage, the right side of my face was also permanently paralyzed. When I woke up, everything was different, mostly in the way I saw the world and in the way it saw and treated me. I was petrified — not only by the scale of the journey ahead, but also by what my life would now look like.

In 2020, I became the first person in the U.K. to undergo a pioneering smile surgery, in which nerve and blood vessels were grafted from my right calf to my upper lip, to give power to my affected side.

The results weren’t immediate, and it took a further three years of physiotherapy to learn to smile again and engage my bite muscles. However, with time, the surgery enabled me to regain some of the expressions I’d lost when I woke up unable to communicate on my right side.

Immediately following my onset of facial paralysis, there was a constant battle between embracing my authentic self and succumbing to the unrealistic standards set by social media. I felt an unspoken expectation to hide or minimize the aspects of my appearance that strayed from the norm, and pinned all hopes on my smile surgery erasing the difference caused by the stroke.

But the surgery didn’t erase it completely. An element of my facial paralysis will always remain and, with hindsight, I’m able to