Taping My Ears to My Face: the most recent testimony to my neurosis.

Warning: this is kind of gross.

It started about a month ago, when my brother-in-law leaned forward across my parent’s kitchen island with a furrowed eyebrow concentrating his stare toward the left side of my face and said, “What the…?” He thereby sent me into a three second eternity in which I imagined all the things that could be wrong with my face, including a newly formed giant birthmark in the shape of California that would eventually start growing hair. The hair I could of course exterminate, not without a certain amount of nausea, but the mark would grow darker and darker every time I set foot in the sun, and I would be forced to either start a scarf-around-the-face trend or have skin grafted from my thigh and plastered to my face.

Just as I was starting to get dizzy, he finished his sentence, disconcertedly noting that it looked like my earring was about to tear through my ear. I suppressed my indignation at the seeming disproportion of the disgusted look on his face and a lobe pulled down by a heavy earring, covered my ear, turned on one heel, and in a most dignified manner scurried to the bathroom, where I removed my earring. There, in my mother’s bathroom, facing a mirror that transforms pores into caves and eyebrow hairs into thorns, I noted that sure enough, this was more than a temporary lobe pulled down by a heavy earring. Rather than a tiny pierced hole, my ear appeared to have been pierced by an envelope opener, and I was forced to admit… a problem.

The first sacrifice I made in effort to coax the skin back to unity was to quit wearing dangly earrings, (a sure sacrifice to anyone who knows me, and undoubtedly the source of my new… malformation). I thought surely this would curb the degeneration of my earlobe.

So now I check my lobe every day in the mirror, to see if it has getting better, and while it doesn’t seem to be getting worse, healing is certainly not taking place either. Much to my regret, I confessed my problems to a friend with an imagination, who noted that if my ear did tear all the way through, my earlobe would look like a tiny hoof. I shrank back in horror, visions of my new freak hoof ear dancing through my brain.

And most unfortunately, my brain seems to have chosen the hoof image to shove to the front of my consciousness each night as I lay down to sleep. Recently it has gotten so bad that I cannot sleep. I tried counting sheep, but of course, sheep have hoofs. Soon in my counting, thousands of pairs of sheep with their hoofs were standing in the middle of a field like a drill team, high kicking their little split toes to the tune of “Isn’t she lovely.” I tossed and turned all night long, but got no rest. So the next night, I took a large band aid and plastered my earlobe to my face. That way I could be sure my earlobe would not move while I was sleeping. Peeling it off the next morning was rough, but the peaceful rest was worth it. So now this is my plan.

Please understand. My ear doesn’t hurt at all, but as soon as I think of it, I swear I can feel it. For those of you wondering, yes, I am fully aware that the angst leading to insomnia is “all in my head,” (while the earlobe hanging on by a thread on the left side, is actually quite out of my head), and don’t care to be reminded. I’ve got plenty of problems in my head, and being reminded of their locale provides little comfort.

I am open to advice, recommended earlobe surgeons, ideas for gracious responses to being called hoof-ear in the new future, and to being unconditionally loved by my faithful friends, whose love for me is in no way contingent upon my earlobe remaining in tact.

Until I figure out a better plan, my ear will remain earring free in the day and taped to my face at night.

To be continued…