I Lost My Face

Hey I'm Anika and until the age of 17 I had a perfectly normal life I was pretty good in school and in a happy relationship with my boyfriend Luis well at least that's what I thought because one night everything changed I was on my way back home from ballet practice when a guy ran up to me and threw a bucket full of liquid on my face at first I thought it was a prank but then my face started to burn more and more until I blacked out when I woke up again everything was dark I thought the lights were off but something was different my whole upper body was hurting and when I touched my face I couldn't feel my eyes or nose my whole face felt like an old margarita pizza and all I had left was my mouth to breathe through I felt like I was trapped in a nightmare no light no face I wanted to cry but I had no eyes so instead I said where am I where am I it was hard to speak without lips but fortunately my right ear still worked so I heard my mom when she said you're alive oh my love what have they done to you she was crying and hugging me after she calmed down she told me that someone had thrown acid in my face and it had burned away my eyes my nose and lips so it wasn't a nightmare my face was really gone but why would anyone do this to me I had always been a very friendly girl and even when my classmates made fun of me saying I wasn't smart I never talked back I just don't like conflict but my anger quickly turned to shame when my boyfriend came to my hospital bed even though I couldn't see I knew how ugly I must have looked to him he asked me how are you but it didn't even sound like he was worried about me I could even hear a bit of disgust in his voice it felt like he had only come to visit me because it was his duty as my boyfriend because after just a few minutes he left again I never felt so bad before and this time I was able to cry I could feel that somewhere under my skin tears were forming the day the police came to visit me they wanted me to describe what happened and they asked if I had any enemies or if someone had threatened me I told them I couldn't think of anyone but two years earlier one of my old classmates had threatened me saying be careful or I'll throw acid on you but that was two years ago and I never took it seriously that girl had been jealous of me because I was in a relationship with Luis I knew that in my city of London acid attacks were common within the black and Muslim community but I'm 100% white and my parents are of Irish descent after a month of investigation the police found out what happened they figured out that my old classmate who had threatened me two years before had an affair with my boyfriend Luis behind my back but because he didn't want to break up with me she paid her cousin 200 pounds to throw acid in my face the police found the exact same acid that was thrown on me on her cousin's clothes the police also took GPS data from his phone that showed he was very close to me on the night of the accident the trial went on for several months when the cousin was asked if he wanted to apologize to me he started crying and said he was so sorry but you could hear in his voice that he was only acting he came up with one excuse after the other for why he'd thrown acid on me even said his parents had never loved him and he needed the 200 pounds his cousin gave him to pay off his debts listening to his excuses disgusted me and even the judge told him to shut up because no one wanted to hear his lies anymore in the end both of them got 20-year prison sentences but to be honest I'm not sure if that's fair considering they've ruined my face for the rest of my life and if they behave well in prison they might get out much earlier I recently visited my former classmate in prison the one who had ordered the acid attack of course it was weird meeting her I had no eyes to look at her directly so all we could do was talk I asked why she had done it and she explained that she had always envied my beauty she said it broke her heart when me and Luis became a couple and the only way to take him away from me was to destroy my beauty at last I asked her if she regretted what she had done and she immediately said yes because now she would have to spend the bed years of her life inside prison that's when I realized that some people truly only care about themselves she didn't apologize or anything she only regretted being caught for her crime I gotta be honest I still sometimes get angry about what happened to me it was such a senseless crime where everybody involved lost the hardest part is that I'll probably never find another boyfriend after what happened to my face my now ex boyfriend Luis cut off all contact with me and I gotta admit that this hurt even more than the acid attack but it won't stop me from living the good life my parents recently bought me a guide dog and to be honest I like him even more than I liked my ex-boyfriend and even without a boyfriend I can still get pregnant using a sperm donor and have my own kids I just hope that in a few decades technology will advance far enough that my doctors can fix my eyes and face again but luckily there are many jobs for blind people like me right now I'm working as a call center agent during the day and I've also started practicing deejaying as a new hobby I guess all of us face tragedies and evil in our lives and even though it wasn't my fault that someone threw acid in my face it would be my fault if I let it make me become bitter and resentful that's why I'm not calling for retribution but for more police and harsher punishments to prevent the senseless violence because right now acid attacks here in the UK are on the rise and some of the victims are less than 10 years old thank you for listening to my story and let me know in the comments how you would deal with losing your face and becoming blind

Channel: Share My Story

Views: 12,688,254

Rating: 4.7975254 out of 5

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Id: F8u7cW1-Nxw

Length: 6min 4sec (364 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 19 2019