I had cosmetic surgery to correct my ears, which had made me the target of ridicule my whole life, but when I got home, my mother glanced at me and burst into tears.

She smiled through her tears.

"I'm not afraid anymore."

I still don't regret having my ears corrected.

The little girl who spent years hiding behind her hair deserved to become a woman who no longer needed to do so.

But now, every time I look in the mirror, I don't think about what has changed.

I'm thinking about what I've finally learned.

For most of my life, I believed I was hiding this part of myself that made me different.

I never knew that this was also the only part of me that my first mother was able to leave me.

And nothing, not even surgery, could ever take away what it truly meant to me.