My Face, A Cubist Painting

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What makes a face beautiful? As Umberto Eco points out in Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1986), symmetry has been an ingredient of beauty from the Roman architect Vitruvius to the medieval friar Vincent of Beauvais. Modern beauty, too, is contingent upon the harmony of parts. How else can one explain the current obsession with facial-symmetry filters on TikTok?

I didn’t give much thought to the symmetry of my face until I woke up one day looking like Picasso’s Tête de femme au chapeau bleu a ruban rouge (1939), my mouth striving towards my right ear, my right eye arid and blind because I couldn’t blink. “Bell’s Palsy,” my physician declared, after ruling out stroke. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

Over the next couple of days, the right side of my face became increasingly rigid as inflammation devoured the myelin sheath of my seventh cranial nerve. Only during acupuncture, which my physician recommended as ancillary therapy, did my features relax into their former symmetry. “Couldn’t you pin my face back into shape with your needles?” I asked, only half-jokingly. But my Chinese acupuncturist demurred. “Patience. Keep your face relaxed. And try not to smile.”

I didn’t have much to smile about. The searing pain behind my right ear kept me up at night when I had to tape my eye shut, an action that provoked a dogged pain in my cheek and forehead. I feared my right eye would open and get injured during my fitful sleep, so I constructed a fortress of pillows around my head to keep it from rolling sideways. Three weeks into Bell’s Palsy I had lost twelve pounds because I couldn’t chew enough food on the mobile side of my mouth while also drinking sufficient water through a straw to prevent dehydration.

Still, there were silver linings. The palsy stiffened me in July. My dean looked at my visage and decided she’d rather not put off the students in my fall classes, so she put me on medical leave instead. My acupuncturist looked at my tongue, shook her head, and decreed: “No meat or dairy until your face is back.” Too weak to protest, I was also intrigued by the possibility of regaining symmetry so long after asymmetrical weeks had morphed into months.

My unblinking eye remained open – a stubborn but inefficient Argus. During the day, I shielded it with saran wrap to keep it moist, and an eye patch, to protect it from the Californian sun. It would regain vision only briefly, after the application of eye drops. I couldn’t shake off the fear of spending the rest of my life as a female cyclops, a miniature, cerebral Polyphema. Would I be able to do my job, which aside from teaching consisted mostly of reading, writing, and publishing?

Since the stipulation of my medical leave was not to work, but to get better, I decided to read myself back to health. Already I had noticed an improvement in the throbbing of my weekly migraines, which had tortured me for decades. I learned that, when stressed out by drought or insects, plants produced minute doses of salicylic acid that acted as pain killers, so I felt encouraged to continue with my plant-based diet. Could I also find a means to restore my cubist face to realism? Only five percent of the patients with my fierce condition were said to never recover. During a sleepless night, while scouring the internet one-eyed, I stumbled upon a fellow sufferer who did.

A British guy, whose spectacularly bad luck had bestowed him with bilateral Bell’s, found out by trial and error that metylcobalamin, an easily absorbable form of vitamin B12, restored his face’s mobility when taken in high doses. I presented my physician with the British solution. “Try it,” he said, “though I don’t understand why the B-complex I prescribed for you shouldn’t work just as well.”

Reader, I tried it – 5000mcg daily – the highest dosage my physician allowed as an “experiment in expensive urine.” Within days, the metal-sheet half of my face softened and regained its human contours. Every day I looked in the mirror to celebrate the appearance of new fine lines. My eye closed fully while I was lying down, then, six months later, also while standing up.

It’s been almost twelve years since my Bell’s Palsy diagnosis. The lower right side of my face has regained symmetry for the most part, which means that, although my right dimple now shows up on my chin, I can smile again in the center of my face. When I close my right eye, however, my cheek writhes with dyskinesia; when I eat, that same eye feeds on tears.

The camera doesn’t like my new face. My right nasolabial fold is deeper, and there is a deep groove under the right side of my mouth; my forehead is still half frozen, and my affected eye looks smaller. But I have learned that I can cheat asymmetry by animating my face and sporting trendy bangs; few people notice I can only raise one eyebrow in surprise or disapproval (certainly not the colleague who helpfully pointed out I got free Botox on half of my forehead).

Like many middle-aged women, I am concerned about wrinkles and sagging jaw lines, but I feel grateful my migraines vanished a decade ago, never to return. As the asymmetry of aging sets in, I comfort myself with the thought of having already experienced it in fast motion.

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