Her parents knew something was wrong as soon as they saw her at birth.
Indira de Rooij, now a 27-year-old nurse living in Almere, the Netherlands, was born with a lymphatic malformation: her lymphatic vessels formed abnormally and filled her chin, tongue, and throat with cysts.
She needed a tracheotomy to breathe and underwent more than 30 surgeries to reduce the malformations. She stopped having surgery when she reached school age because the risk of her face becoming paralyzed was too high.
At school, she says, some children took photos of her to make fun of her. When she was 16, a post on X compared her to a facially disfigured movie monster and, according to her, racked up 10.000 likes.
Thousands of strangers laughed at her face. After years of therapy, Indira says she’s at her best: “I’ve never been happier than I have been this year”. She doesn’t say she’s fully accepted herself (“I’ve only partly accepted myself”) and admits that not a day goes by without people staring at her or laughing at her. But she no longer lets their laughter decide how she lives.
