As a young jazz student, I always sought out the songs of Dorothy Fields. Her work is clever, refreshingly conversational, and a joy to sing. She was also one of the few women included in the Great American Songbook canon. Today I found myself wanting to listen to ‘Pick Yourself Up,’ a popular depression era song written in 1936:

Nothing's impossible, I have found
For when my chin is on the ground
I pick myself up
Dust myself off
And start all over again

As many of you know and can see, I have a facial difference. I learned of that term in the last six months, and for the first time in a long time, I felt a tectonic shift of understanding move through me. To have language for your lived experience is deeply empowering. Before this I had been using facial disfigurement, which didn’t feel right, and before that, I used the medical term facial deformity, which really didn’t feel right. I was at a loss.

And just like any new piece of information we gain, we must sit with it for a bit and let it settle to see what it will mean for our lives. Today, I had a good day, after a series of not great ones. Then this song came to mind. The chin reference made me smile and as I read each line, I found I appreciated so much what Fields was trying to say to America in this song. Pick yourself up (if you can), dust yourself off (take a moment. Catch your breath, assess the damage, then acknowledge the dirt that got kicked up) and start again. So much of my life has been this little cycle, except sometimes I would forget to dust myself off or take a deep breath. I’d just numbly charge forward and make the mistake of letting other people’s labels for me cling to my body like a thick, dirty, film. And it was heavy.

We have a long way to go in acknowledging and treating facial difference in this country. As I continue to learn and piece together my experiences, I will do my best to share and educate. If you’d like to learn more, I recommend this article: The Elephant in the Room: Explaining Facial Difference

And if you’d like a little peppy song to remind you of our inevitable job as humans to keep going, then I leave you with Diana Krall’s version of “Pick Yourself Up”: