You ever stare at your reflection in a shop window, mid-step, and suddenly notice your nose doing most of the talking in your face when you didn’t even invite it to the conversation? That’s usually how it starts.

You notice it in the worst places—elevator mirrors, harsh bathroom lighting, the front camera that somehow adds ten years and steals all the volume from your cheeks—and suddenly your face doesn’t feel like it belongs to the same version of you that you remember from

You sit there under those bright surgical lights, paper cap digging into your forehead, trying not to overthink the fact that someone is about to rearrange parts of your face that gravity has been quietly pulling down for years, and somewhere between signing the con

You sit in that chair with a paper bib around your neck, trying not to overthink it while a machine that sounds like a quiet electric buzz gets wheeled closer, and in that moment you realize—this isn’t one of those “relax and enjoy” treatments people post about with