The masks we wear on a daily basis not only change the perceptions of people looking in. but also of the wearer, the person looking back out at the world.

When I was born I came in to the world with the inability to show emotion.  I suffered from a rare form of facial paralysis called Leyoa Syndrome, which meant that I could blink and speak relatively normally but I was unable to convey anything through facial expression at all; the nerves in my face were alive and healthy but they didn’t communicate with my brain – my face looked normal (albeit slightly sullen) until I tried to communicate with anyone.  I was blissfully unaware of the problem for the first four years of my life but once I began school it became a huge hurdle.  I found it very hard to make friends, children can be unintentionally cruel, they used to call me stone face, then ‘mask face’ and latterly ‘frozen face’, children’s taunts are never particularly original are they?  I spent playtimes sitting reading in a corner of the playground whilst all the other children chase each other around, laughing amongst themselves. They say that 90% of our communication is conveyed through body language, I can only imagine what percentage of that is attributable to facial expression, but this was something completely alien to me, no matter how much I wished otherwise.  High school was even harder and as my friends (all two of them) began to get boyfriends and I was somehow left behind, it was like I was a bystander, watching the lives of others play out before me whilst mine remained stunted and frozen, just like my face.

I underwent regular tests up at the hospital to see if anything could be done about the paralysis, the hospital were unwilling to try anything surgical until I had finished growing so I was just monitored for the first 16 years of my life.  Eventually, when I was 19, I was approached by scientists from the local University, they contacted me through my consultant and it was one of the most emotional moments of my life, I felt so important, all these people working so hard, experimenting with science just to help me.

The main consultant, Mrs Goodhall explained to me that they had developed a procedure during the last few years which they were initially trialling for other forms of paralysis (extensive, successful trials had been done for legs and arms) but they had heard of my case and wanted to see if their methods would work on me, although they had successful trials large scale but this was the first time they had trialled the procedure through microsurgery.  The procedure involved cutting the front of my face around the edges and implanting tiny electrodes in to the tips of my nerves that would send electrical impulses to my brain, in effect, my face would become an electronic mask which would be able to convey my true emotions to the outside world.  It was amazing to even think of it, sometimes I couldn’t – sometimes the enormity of it would take my breath away and I had to try and blank it out of my mind, I was going to have an bionic face!  I could only begin to dream about how this would change my life, maybe I would find it easier to make friends, maybe I would even have the confidence to go to clubs, join a night-school class or just walk to the shops without living in fear of someone trying to have a conversation with me.  Don’t get me wrong, I can speak to people okay but this has knocked my confidence a bit.  I can always pin-point the exact moment people notice my problem; they begin to speak to me, I respond, they often think I’m being sarcastic because I don’t have an expression then they realise that all I can do is blink and talk, there’s no laughing, smiling, frowning, no anything, you can get fed up with that; the look of annoyance, then shock, then sympathy – the sympathy was the hardest to bear.

There was absolutely no question about it, I was having it done!  Mum and Dad were so worried about it, they just loved me the way I was and didn’t want me to take the risk (Oh, did I not mention? There was a risk that the operation could damage my existing nerve tissue and I would loose my speech and my ability to blink).  I knew it was a risk but to me, there was even the possibility of it being life threatening because of the anaesthetic because I would be out for so long but if it worked, it was worth it.

I would have the operation in November, that suited me fine because I could wrap my face during the winter months while the wounds were healing, I was told that scarring would be minimal which was good news – once I had the operation, if successful, I would be able to express thought and feelings like I had never been able to before.

November soon came around and I had the operation, I don’t mind telling you It was the scariest moment of my life, the doctors said that they thought it went well but it would be a while before we would know for sure because we were waiting for the little neurons to do their work and knit into my nerve endings and I can’t even begin to describe how much my face itched and how tight and hot it felt.

When the time came to unravel the bandages, the doctors had to try and find a way of linking the electrodes with the messages my brain were sending, this wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be and I spent the first couple of weeks in facial physiotherapy, trying to exercise my muscles by trying to pull all manner of strange and obscure faces.  Eventually the breakthrough came, I raised my eyebrows!  Deliberately!  I didn’t think it was possible but, without even saying a word I looked as though I was asking a question, eventually other expressions came, I learned to frown and I pretty much had control of the upper half of my face – the lower half was a bit trickier to get the hang of! 

I eventually learned to turn my mouth down at the corners, which made me look unhappy and I eventually got the hang of moving things at the top and bottom of my face at the same time!  A couple of weeks later it happened, the one thing that I had been waiting my entire life for,  my friend took me for a quick drink at our local pub and a woman was walking past and she had her skirt tucked in to her knickers, I laughed out loud, not the normal, stilted almost sarcastic laugh that I could usually afford but a hearty proper laugh that stopped my friend Emma in her tracks (until she realised what I was laughing at, then she joined in), we both laughed and laughed until tears streamed down our faces and my laugh eventually turned into a cry or relief and happiness. I felt as though my life was complete!!  Here I was, sharing a joke with a friend and laughing, I felt as though I had conquered the world – I felt normal.

The only drawback in this was that I couldn’t lie, the main links had been made to correspond my emotions with facial expressions but I wasn’t able to think one thought in my head and convey another meaning in my face.  I found this very difficult to deal with because lying is so easy with a frozen face and now that had gone.  Day to day was fine, but every now and then someone would ask what I thought of their new shoes (hideous) or my friend would ask if her bum looked big in her dress (massive!) or if I liked her new boyfriend (no, he’s a complete idiot) – the words, the lies, would come tumbling out of my mouth as directed but my face was programmed to tell the truth so it didn’t really matter what I said, people always believed my face.

On the whole, this was quite a bad thing – although, obviously not as bad as having a face that wouldn’t move, I still had confidence issues that I found it hard to deal with and by the time I was 25 I still hadn’t had a boyfriend – I had grown close to my friend Ryan, I had met him at the Print Works where I work - he had known me when my face wouldn’t move and he had seen my transition, it was as though he had seen me as a still life drawing and now he was watching me in animation.  Nothing had ever happened between us, I wished it would but I still couldn’t find confidence anywhere.  One day, when we were just sitting having coffee in a local café and Ryan asked if I had feelings for him, he just came out with it quite unexpectedly and I felt so embarrassed, I didn’t know how to respond so I said ‘no’, luckily enough, my face said ‘yes’ for me, just as it did two years later when Ryan asked me to marry him (although my voice had also said ‘Yes’, in fact, so had my body as I jumped up and down like a mad woman in the middle of the street).  Another year later, Gracie was born, I just can’t even begin to describe to you the absolute pure untainted joy I felt when she smiled, just a few days after she was born, okay, I know it was only wind, but to me it was the most beautiful smile I had ever seen.