Tony:

A personal perspective.

When Richard asked me to write this for the website I really wasn’t keen, but it has actually been a very cathartic experience, hopefully it will give others the courage to get help, talk to someone about how they are feeling, even write it down and send it to me.
I was 15 when a girl in my class made a throw away comment about my looks ( or in her opinion lack of looks) it meant nothing to her but for me it started a series of events that would last 20 years.

At that age young people are very conscious of the way they look it’s a terrible age anyway with fizzing hormones and acne and finding out who the hell you are. For me it was particularly painful, I became so conscious that I was ugly that I would walk with my head down or wear a hat with a large peak, if I could have gotten away with wearing a balaclava I would have.

As the years went on and my face matured my issues with it just got worse, the crazy thing was that in all that time I had long-term girlfriends who must have found something appealing in what they saw. Nothing anyone said made any difference I thought they were just to ‘nice’ to tell me the cold, hard truth, any compliments that came my way were discounted as insincere.

I would look in the mirror and picture my face after major cosmetic surgery, I would plan in intimate detail all the work that needed doing, I would send off for brochures from hospitals that perform the operations and sit there like a child with a toy catalogue picking out the new shape of my eyes, a shapely nose, cutting and tucking my face until I was happily unrecognisable.

My mental state was such that I thought I was the most repulsive being ever to walk the earth, in my mind I thought I don’t deserve to inflict my face on the general public so I didn’t …I stayed in as much as possible, never went out socially, went to work (I worked alone) came home and shut the door. 

I eventually got married to a girl I didn’t love,  my damaged self esteem gave me a  twisted view on how the rest of my life was going to be and I felt so low and worthless that I figured that if this woman can bare to look at me then that’ll do for me. My lack of self worth manifested itself in me treating my wife like crap and taking all my issues out on her so surprise, surprise the marriage ended.

I’d been suffering for about 10 or15 years, my face was in my opinion just getting worse with age, one day at a very low ebb I decided I had had enough of this crappy face, if I could afford cosmetic surgery, I would do it myself!

I very calmly arranged three mirrors so I could see all my face, got a series of powerful bulldog clips, a pair of scissors and a scalpel from the local DIY store.

I pulled at flaps of what I considered baggy skin around my face and attached the bulldog clips, It hurt but soon went numb…  then I started cutting, first with the scalpel then with the scissors, it was unbelievably painful but my feeling that this little bit of pain would solve my problems, drove me on. I cut the skin from around my eyes, I was bleeding like crazy I couldn’t stop it, I looked at my self in the mirror with blood streaming out of my face and I started to cry, I sat and cried for what seemed like ages, mopping up tears and blood with toilet tissue, I knew I was at my lowest point, I felt very feint but managed to get to the local Doctors, I got to the reception and passed out.

I got stitches in my wounds and sat down with the Doctor and talked and cried and talked and cried some more. He suggested that I was suffering from a condition called Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) I went for counselling which was OK but then I heard about the work that the Sculpture Workshop were doing and went along to watch a creative session taking place, I was struck by how much confidence the tutor imparts to the participants, how they enable people with little or no past experience of being creative to produce work that was obviously great and the people around the table were amazed at what they had created in two hours of having fun.

In my sessions I had Richard Austin as my Sculpture tutor, he is also a Rogarian          ( Person Centred ) Counsellor so I felt quite safe to talk about my issues,  we looked at all types of faces and talked about perceptions of beauty and difference, I created and worked on a clay face, changing it time and time again, pushing the clay around and being in control of it and working very quickly. It was quite empowering thing to do but the most incredible thing was when I returned to the face a week later, I took off the plastic bag keeping the clay moist and couldn’t believe I had created it, it looked so good, it was a male face and quite handsome. Then Richard took a photo of me and one of the sculpture I had made and loaded them onto the Computer and brought them up on the screen side by side, looking at the two images together I realised I had created a self portrait and I liked the look of it, I didn’t think it was grotesque or ugly. For me it was a massive breakthrough, it was like looking at my face for the first time in my life, over the next weeks my confidence and self esteem grew, I walked with my head held high and smiled a lot.

Now I’m 35 years old, in a job I love mixing with lots of other people and I met and married a wonderful woman.