When I was 8 years old, I lost 80% of my face. I’ve had exactly 62 surgeries. It was December 5th, 2,007. I was 8 years old. Come home from school, didn’t know how late I was, but walking up into the backyard, as I always do, we. We have two pit bulls. Open the latch to get, as I usually do, and the boy dog. I ended up escaping the yard. So I grabbed the dog, pulled it back into the yard, and I slipped on some ice at the gate. That’s when that. That boy dog decided to use it as an opportunity. Was growling and lunging up against me. And then it just started attacking me. That’s when the girl dog approached, and she did the best that she could to fight off the boy dog. They’re fighting each other. They’re biting each other. They’re biting me. And I’m in the mix of all of this, in this snow, in my own blood. I didn’t have any sensation of pain anymore. Wasn’t until my dad came outside. He was looking for me because I was late. And the dog stopped, and my dad came and picked me up and brought me inside. I was in a medically induced coma while they did repairs on me. Taking skin grafts from my legs, removing skin from my legs to. To put it on my face. Because I didn’t have any really any skin. When I woke up, I had no Recollection of the accident at all. And they didn’t ask me exactly what I remembered it. The focus was just focusing on recovery. I spent five years since the accident in homeschool. I got to go back to school again in high school. I was having a lot of nasal breathing problems over the years, and so they’ve spent years building me a new nose, and this is my third nose that I’ve had. I still have my left eye, because everything is still intact with my left eye. I just have a severely damaged cornea. This is kind of what it looks like to look out of my. My left eye, maybe a little bit more blurry. Reliving the accident, uh, was something I dealt with every time I closed my eyes, every time I blinked. It took years to get past that. Understanding that being a kid was never going to happen again. That was a hard adjustment to have. It was really isolating time, spending all of those years and months with people misunderstanding me. Artwork ended up being a bridge where I can start having these conversations about ableism or about trauma and about healing and about recovery, and start getting my message out and start not feeling alone about what I was going through. I’m not just a survivor of the dog accident. I’m a survivor of many different things, and I use things that I’ve been through to turn them into something positive. And Using that to help others. And I think about who to blame. By the time I had the accident, I probably have raised probably, like, 60 different pit bulls. They never attacked anyone, so we never had that problem. You know, there are some bad dogs out there. There are also some bad owners out there. Holding blame holds too much weight. So I had to learn to accept the past. The past, and understand that accidents do happen. Advice that I would give it to others is, it’s going to be okay in the long run, but it’s going to take time. Because of the work, because of the care that I put into my body, into my mind. I love my scars. Without them, I wouldn’t be who I am.