In a family of 50, there’s always somewhere to be. Susan decided to stop finding reasons not to go.
Susan comes from a big family: nine siblings, 26 nieces and nephews, and more cousins than she can count. They all live near one another in Central New York. There are family functions, the family business, and, on any given Thursday, dinners at the family restaurant. Events, big and small, are constant.
For years, Susan was rarely among them.
She’ll tell you she was always shy, the quiet one in a loud family, the reader, the one who finds her corner. But somewhere along the way, shyness became something else.
She stopped leaving her house. She started dreading family events. She’d hide behind relatives in photographs, and when her sister put a photo on a mug, she’d have rather broken it than drink from it.
“I wasn’t living a full life,” she says. “I was hiding from it.”
She’d been thinking about a facelift for the better part of a decade. She lost weight she’d gained during the COVID-19 pandemic, fit into her clothes again—and still couldn’t stand what she saw.
So she turned to her sister Jennifer. “Be careful what you ask a sibling,” Susan says, “because they will tell you the truth.” Susan asked if it was time, and Jenny said yes.
Susan called the Quatela Center for Plastic Surgery that same day.
The morning of the procedure, she sat on her front porch and rocked. She kept reminding herself how proud she was for doing this, because it was the scariest thing she’d ever done.
When she came to later that day, she felt it immediately: relief. The negative thoughts she’d carried for a decade were gone.
As she healed, something she hadn’t expected surfaced. The internal weight—the dread before events, the constant cataloging of what was coming up and how she could avoid it—had vanished.
At the time, as always, there was a family event on the books: the annual clam bake. Two months post-op, she says, she couldn’t get there fast enough. She thought about what she’d wear, how she’d do her hair. And her family noticed. They started calling her “new blood,” as they got to meet the new Susan they’ve always known.
She’s not a different person. She’s still the quiet woman who loves her porch and her books. She’s just lighter now, and kinder to herself, and more present with the people she loves.
“Life is too short to spend hiding from the world,” she says.
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