The following content contains triggering content such as self harming. Viewer discretion is advised.
/ Audrey Tan hasn't got everything. Everyone else did. At 16, she's disfigured after an incident in school. Now, she has to try her best to cope w...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
They call me disfigured.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that about me. I'm sure the nurses and doctors didn't mean to make it sound like an insult, but when you've lived your past 7 years in school constantly bashed upon because of how you look you find a way to think that everything is negative in one way or another. It gets easy sometimes but-
But I'm afraid.
I'm afraid that it's not just the doctors and nurses speaking about my disfigured face in a professional term, but the patients that occupy the same hospital room as me. They have small burns - some have large burns on their back or their thighs covered with red sores connecting together like constellation stars across their hands. Sometimes they look at me and I don't see anything but pity in them and maybe when I leave the room for a lunch break or another psychological check up with my therapist they would cluster together to talk about me: that girl recently admitted into the ward for her disfigured face.
They'll ask: So how do you think she burned her face off? Was she suicidal? They'll assume that I'm some crazy freak who tried to kill herself by pouring sulfuric acid over her face - a suicide gone wrong. They'll ask the doctors and nurses; how did the girl in Bed 1C get here? What happened to her? And the doctors and nurses would pause, their mouth slightly agape, loss for words, their hands holding on to more clipboards and their mind whirring for an answer because when they think of the girl in the bed they think of how sad, tragic it is. Then they'll spare an almost unnoticeable glance at each other for just a second, until one of them open up their throat, and say bullshit like confidential laws and they couldn't tell them how I ended up here anyway. I did some research and it's called HIPAA or something in America.
And perhaps, behind closed doors - where confidential laws for their patients don't really apply, they speak behind office doors about how terrible it was for a 15-year-old girl to have her face destroyed, disfigured. Perhaps they sit down at the private lunch room, hands caressing a small cup of warm coffee at late midnight, plastic forks twirling wet, instant spaghetti from the dollar store, bouncing their legs as they shook their heads: Poor girl, she's so young. How unfortunate. How tragic.
They'll talk about me, the bad bad bad bad bad bad and the good about me even though they don't know a single shit about me - who I am, who I really am. They read my medical details and know that I'm Audrey Tan, the name so familiar on their tongues because when I first came in doctors after doctors came in after my parents begged them endlessly to find someone - something to fix my face. The girl, Audrey Tan, with parents who were desperate and begging. Because that's what matters to them the most. My looks, my academics, not me.
Not Audrey Tan. I'm the girl who was forced to do what her parents wanted her to be - perfect. I ate a spoon of peanut butter when I was 7 and ended up with an inflamed throat and swollen eyes, the doctor diagnosed me with allergies to peanuts. They forced me to eat peanut butter until I could get used to the feeling of swollen flesh in my esophagus so I wasn't flawed. The flawed child. I'm not a flawed child. I'm a perfect child. But, it didn't work. It just worsened my reactions. Now, I carry an Epi pen in my bag all the time. I avoid peanuts. But most importantly, I avoid my parents.
