Wednesday, June 27, 2012

My journey thus far...

STATS

Jaw Surgery in 99 days
Blog Views: almost 70, 000
Youtube Views: over 260, 000
Youtube subscribers: 647
Blogger Followers: 87

It's amazing how many people have been following my journey.
Thank you so much.

I'm seeing the ortho tomorrow and I better get some good news.
Wish me luck guys!

xoxo Terra

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Terra M.I.A.

Hey guys,
Sorry i have been gone for a while.
Life caught up with me, and I also got caught up with WOW, therefore I have been gone.

Anyway nothing really changed. My bite looks the same, feels the same.
I have to call my surgeon and see if he sent anything to my ortho or if he plans to because I'm going in on thursday and I had moulds done a month ago.

No news is pretty good news in terms of my life.
I feel happier because i'm not stressed.
I'm looking forward to next weekend. Driving to Quebec on fridays since my brother wants to bring his girlfriend a tv (she lives there). Sunday is Canada day so we are going to Cobourg like we did last year.

It's funny because the less I think about jaw surgery the less nervous I get.
This weekend I was showing my boyfriend some before and after pictures andI started to get nervous again, and right away he's like "I knew we shouldn't be looking at this stuff, it gets you thinking about your surgery"

I think it's around 100 days away now which is just over 3 months. I don't think my bite is ready but i'm no orthodontist. To be honest I'm getting really nervous about my pre op stuff in 2 months. The surgery itself doesnt make me nervous because I'll be ZzzzzZZZzz the whole time and won't know whats going on. Plus my mom will be here and shes awesome.

Oh I sort of went blonde...



Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Excuse me if I sound incoherent lately

Hey guys,

I've been getting so much great feedback with my blog and my youtube.
I am so grateful for all the messages and comments. You guys make me feel like I'm really not alone in this.

I promise that shortly I will get back to all the comments and messages once I figure a few things out.
I really wish I didn't sign up for summer school this year. It was sort of pointless, I'm only taking one course and it's with this horrible prof who fails everyone. I've been holding back on this course in hopes a better prof will be teaching. So now of course I check next years courses and he isn't teaching anymore.

I really want some time to just relax and take a breather before life hits full force again but I face the whole family guilt thing. I have to be doing something at every given moment or they just make me feel guilty. Meanwhile my brother has been hope for years making excuses as to why he is neither employed nor in school. I guess one of us has to be the good one.
Once this jaw surgery stuff is over I'm going to go back to my non stop year round school years.
Two years, and then my designation. I feel blessed to know what direction I'm heading in. I just wish my family would take a chill pill.

Well the moulds are done and at the surgeons office.
I have an adjustment in 3 weeks.
My bite isn't opening. Grrrrr

Hope you're all doing well.

P.s. On a different note I love my new gym. I seriously want to wake up every day and just go there.
My boyfriend told me, when you find a gym you like you're going to enjoy working out. I didn't believe him because I've always hated the gym, but it turns out he was right. I just hadn't found my place.


When you start the journey it feels like you'll never get to the end of it. But I look at this picture from two years ago and remember where I was in my life at that point. I have grown and changed so much in two years that I really believe even these next two years will flash before my eyes and the rewards from all the hard work will one day prevail. 



Sunday, June 3, 2012

Braces, jaw surgery, and how it effects us

Hey guys.

I've been posting more than usual lately, and not only about jaw surgery.
A part of me feels like this blog is my life escape right now.
I can't express how grateful I am that I have a place to go, talk about all the things I feel and all these issues, and not be judged, or criticized.

So many of us know that in our day to day lives people can't understand what it's like to go through this process. We haven't all had anyone to confide in about our fears, our disconnection with ourselves, and our adjustment to all the changes. A lot of us have dealt with family, friends, and loved ones who do not understand, and have if anything ended up feeling more alone because of that.

I want to say that to anyone who is frustrated with your appearance, with your jaw, with how if effects your speech, and the pain both physical and mental that goes along with it, you are not alone.
I have to say more so than the TMJ pain, and the braces, the headaches and the neck pain, sometimes the worst pain is the pain you feel inside. I felt like after years of learning to love myself the way I was, and learning to ignore my speech impediment, and my convex profile, my open bite, the lisp, I really felt like I learned to accept that all. After that struggle, being faced with jaw surgery is a whole struggle in itself, and to some of us it becomes an undoing of all the accepting we've had to do to be content in our own skin.

I started this process nervous but excited at the prospects of having a functional jaw, and an ideal profile. I was so excited to see all the before and after pictures, and to see how happy people become once it's all over. the excitement lasted a while, but then it started to change. It started to turn into fear and anxiety. Was I doing the right thing? My face started to change with the braces. It became hollow at the centre, and I felt like I didn't recognize myself anymore.

I went through a very dark time. Around this time last year I had been in the braces for a couple months, and I started to really lose any connection to myself. I started to feel insecure, and I obsessed with the braces, with every feature on my face, with the changing of my bite. I felt like no one could love me like this.

It sort of feels like being haunted by yourself. You feel isolated because the people around you don't understand what you are going through. At least the people around me didn't understand. You count the days, hours, minutes. You want the time to go by faster and faster because you are waiting for your life to come back, your life before jaw surgery, and checking the blogs and the forums and youtube, and facebook. The searching for information, and similar cases, and surgeons.

It becomes madness.

I'm sure not everyone has had it like this. I'm sure some people have had the supportive family, or friends, the supportive boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, or husband. Be grateful for those people.

I remember the days when I didn't know the extent of my jaw issues, before I knew I had TMJ issues, and that orthognathic surgery would correct my speech impediment, before I knew that there was so much more to it than just my teeth closing. When my profile would look better, and before I knew it would give me a chin. Those were the days. I remember looking into rhinoplasty to correct the convexity of my nose. I wish that was really the only issue because it would have been so easy to get a nose job and go on with my life.

14 months in braces, 8 teeth pulled, and still waiting for double jaw surgery, genioplasty, and gum grafting surgery. Thats not to mention braces back in high school to compensate for my bite. Could any process be longer? Really? Is it possible to have to wait any longer for a surgery?

Could this post get any worse? any more depressing.

Well no, it won't, and I'll tell you why.
Out of all this depression and confusion I learned a lot. I learned that I became really mean to myself. That I told myself I was ugly, and that my hollow face, my lisp, and all the pain I feel was all my fault.
I needed to give myself a time out!


Today I realize this. No matter how my face turns out, I am doing the most I can because I love myself. And remember, you are doing everything you can because you love yourself too!
when you wonder if you're making the right decision look at it this way, you deserve to be happy, you deserve every opportunity to increase your quality of life, you deserve this surgery.
I mean that in a good way.

I've met so many people in this jaw surgery community, and I have yet to meet even one person you wasn't an amazing, sweet, and wonderful person. You are all so amazing. Each and every person I have talked to, who has commented, or talked to me on facebook, or on youtube, or through email, you are all so wonderful and you deserve to have an amazing outcome from all of this.

Instead of detaching from myself, I'm detaching from the artificial hopes of becoming someone perfect after this surgery. I just want to be a better version of me. I want to be Terra without the braces, and without the lisp, I want to be Terra with the beautiful smile. That is it.

Thank you blogger, youtube, facebook, archwired, jawsurgeryblog.com, and every other means that I have been in communication with this wonderful community. I can't wait for the day when the braces come off and I can go back to being me, but I really couldn't have even gotten this far without all the amazing support out there. We are so lucky to live in an age with all of this. Don't be scared to share your story, because someone out there with a story similar to yours is looking for someone to relate to.

<3

Terra




Friday, June 1, 2012

New hair, new eyebrows, new workout plan

Lets see, where do I start

How about with the jaw. My TMJ is killing me, today was a really bad day for that. My head has been pounding all day long. As I wrote last time, I'm going in on Monday so I'll update about that next week.

Secondly, I joined a new gym as my old one got up and left in the night. I really like this gym though and as part of my registration I had a fitness evaluation and a plan made.
Surprisingly my body fat is much lower than I thought it was, it's only 20%, I thought it was 26% but that is good news. I'm therefore within the athletic range. I'd like to be at 18% though.
I wanted to start out a more intense plan but because school is so busy and my surgery could possibly be moved up I'm doing a personalized plan for the next while. Probably 4 days a week but it sounds good.

Also, I finally got my hair somewhat where I want it colour wise. I have naturally blackish hair and eyebrows and its really hard to go light without going red. Well I found my perfect colour and its light brown with lots of blonde sections. It's very ashy and I love it. I bleached my eyebrows to match and I love that too.

Other than that, I've heard too much bad news today. There is a warrant out for a crazy kitten killing, man cutting up and mailing body parts of an exchange student to parliament, crazy porn star out on the loose, and they don't know where he is. Of course he was born in my city and could be here or anywhere. It's really creepy and I think I'll sleep with my windows closed tonight.

Anyway I'm going to go take a chill pill and study.
Later guys!!