Being A Cleftie — A Rollercoaster Of Trauma, Resilience, And Success

Far more people are born with cleft lip and palate than we think, but far too few talk about it…

Attila Vágó

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Author in a black and white colour-scheme with tilted head to the left, looking into the camera.

You look the way you do, because you were kissed by the angels before you were born, said a friend of mine many years ago. She claimed it was an old Romanian saying. Two decades later, I still haven’t heard anyone else say it nor could I find any evidence that being kissed by an angel is associated with cleft lip and palate, so I’ll assume she was just being nice. One thing is evident though, I remembered it, even if we weren’t friends for long, nor did we ever meet in real life. The words, however, stayed with me, and so did many other things that I never really opened up about before. Until now…

It’s time to talk about being a cleftie, because if nobody understands us, it’s probably because we never spoke loud enough.

The diametral opposite of “being kissed by an angel” that I’ve gotten as a reaction to my looks was “you have a face fit for breaking jars”. That’s a very crude but infinitely better translation than Google’s, from the Romanian “față de spart borcane”. You’d think this was childhood bullying, but you’d be wrong. Both…

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Attila Vágó

Staff software engineer, tech writer, author and opinionated human. LEGO and Apple fan. Accessibility advocate. Life enthusiast. Living in Dublin, Ireland. ☘️