My Biggest Botox Regrets (& What I Wish I Knew About My Face)

Our glow was never injected. It was always just remembered.

For a long time I believed I needed to fix my face to be lovable.

What I didn't understand then was that no procedure, no amount of filler, could repair what was actually a disconnection. From my body. From my past. From my own sense of worth.

This isn't a story bashing Botox. It's a reckoning. A reclamation. A story about armor, identity, and eventually, peace.

I was born with a facial difference that required over fifteen years of orthodontic work, expanders, braces, retainers, and five facial surgeries in my mid twenties just to breathe, eat, and speak without pain. Severe crowding. A narrow palate. A bite that made chewing nearly impossible. A full reconstruction with bone grafts and titanium screws.

That experience shaped how I saw myself early. I didn't see pretty. I saw survival. I saw difference. And I learned, the way so many of us do, to perform instead of simply be.

After the surgeries, something no one prepared me for happened. The world saw a different face, and responded differently. Suddenly there was access I hadn't had before. But it didn't feel like me. My body was still wired for performance. My patterns were still avoidant, still critical of myself. I looked different. I hadn't healed.

Years later I was gifted filler through a work partnership. I said yes, even knowing my face carried scar tissue underneath. The moment the needle went in, my body remembered everything. I cried, not from the pain, though it was real, but because I recognized I had abandoned myself again. I wasn't fixing anything. I was disappearing into what I thought beauty was supposed to look like.

We've been taught that glow comes from products and procedures. The truth is simpler and stranger: glow is biology. It's circulation, it's tissue that isn't braced for a threat, it's a body that feels safe enough to be seen.

After my twin pregnancy I had surgery again, to repair a significant abdominal separation. This time the recovery looked different. I didn't hate my body anymore, but I grieved how long I had abandoned it. This time recovery came with real practices, daily reconnection, not more performance.

I've had Botox. I've had filler. I've regretted both, and learned from both. I'm not here to tell you what's right for your face. I'm here to ask the questions I wish someone had asked me. Is this for me, or for how I want to be seen. Am I glowing, or just disappearing into acceptable. Can I come back to my own face without numbing it first.

True glow was never something you chase. It's something your body remembers, once it feels safe enough to.