top of page

is waif

AN ODE TO NOSE

Ok so here’s the premise. I’m insecure about my nose. Since the age I knew how to be insecure about things. Although using masks to cover up and be socially responsible?? Amazing. Did NOT see that one coming.

My nose has taken quite the beating. When your nose protrudes from your face, it’s an easy target. A visit from a softball, a football, the back of a friend’s head and an unfortunate glass window. Every break and crack disfigured it more to my unliking. It was passed down by my beautiful Italian mother and in some sense, I know its power. Noses hold generations of history, worn on the faces of those who came before us. Our noses carry stories. This nose in its past lives has desperately crossed oceans, found love, been heartbroken, found love again, gotten in the way of a brother’s fist, felt countless tears, has had lots of zits, mine included, and held up many pairs of reading glasses. That power is hard to remember though when your friends make a cake in the shape of your nose and nickname you “Gru,” as in the Despicable Me villain. You see what I’m getting at? Great. I laughed it off. Then cried about it later. As we do.

“My nose may be broken, but it holds the same privilege I do.”

I wouldn’t call my nose atrocious. It has CHARACTER dammit. But character doesn’t get Nic “greek god” Frangos to like you in eighth grade. All this is to say I got glasses in college and it helped distract from my nose and yeah, I’ll admit, I felt a little better. 

But deep down I was ashamed about how much energy I put into disliking my profile. Could. I. Be. This. Vain? I knew my disdain for my nose had to go deeper. Not just an aversion to brokenness or imperfection. Rather, a learned lens, one which favors thin and small, especially for womxn. I have come to learn it is not a journey to just love one’s own, but to understand the ways in which standards for noses have been used to hurt, caricaturize and belittle. To flip the narrative that told me that noses must be corrected, straightened, shrunk, aligned to our brows and to the liking of another’s’ gaze. That they must be anglicized. If you google the word “nose” a bunch of small, symmetrical, white ones pop up. Talk about a racialized beauty landscape. My nose may be broken, but it holds the same privilege I do.

Taking pride in each of our noses is an act of resistance; against beauty standards, against false hierarchies and stereotypes. It’s also a big “fuck you” to the sunglasses industry. Why do you always have to put a mirror on the display? I know they will be off centered without even looking. Fuck you. 

For those of you with naturally gifted noses or stitched up noses – no hate. You get to own yours too. A friend of mine just got a nose job, though she prefers “rhinoplasty” when speaking to a particularly judgy relative. She had a medical reason, but at the end of the day she also wanted it straight. No judgement lady! Been there. You do your thing. Our noses carry stories. 

One day, pre-corona, my little queer heart was pining over the compelling and //mysterious// barista at my local coffee shop. In this moment, I reflected on what I must appear like to her, clearly peacocking in my fresh Reebok kicks, and I became intensely self-conscious of my nose. I sat there in all my shame/glory and decided NoT ToDAY. I took a big sip of my lukewarm cappuccino and drew up some faces owning their noses. It is a little ode to the nose, and the folks who wear them. To the noses that can smell and the ones that cannot. To the mended noses, the healing noses, the noses bruised or brutalized. To the thing that boldly goes before us, pointing the way. We claim these noses as ours. Grinning, scrunching, bleeding. Molding the terrain of our faces.

On occasion, I open the medicine cabinet, the kind with the mirror attached. I stare at and ridicule my facial protrusion. But today, rather than resign to frustration, I rest my glasses securely on its bridge.

“Fuck it,” I defiantly say to no one. I dare to wear my nose with some goddamn pride.

bottom of page