My ears are messed up
When I was in 3rd grade, it became inescapably obvious that I'd been born with some kind of messed up head, and that one of my ears was situated significantly higher on the side of my skull than the other ear. I remember adults trying to "fix my hair" and growing more and more freaked out that the ear would just not go under the hair. It stuck out because it was in the wrong place.
My parents then got me cosmetic surgery to move the ear. So, in the end, I grew up looking relatively symmetrical. (I am not symmetrical. There's stuff going on with the shape of my skull that would shock you.) After the surgery, I remember having to wear a gigantic bandage on the side of my head for days and days. It made me look like a cartoon character who'd been beaned on the side of the head with a baseball, or something. There was a big pile of bandages over my hear, then a strap of additional bandage going fully around my head. I wish I had pictures of it.
The result is that I now have one normal ear and one, like, monstrously reconstructed ear that looks normal from a distance but is actually shaped completely differently. If you pinch the top of my right ear you'll feel a strange topography of crinkled cartilage that was assembled by a doctor somehow? Apparently, the doctors cut the top of my ear and then squished it down so that the highest point on my right ear would be even with the highest point on my left. The bottom part of my ear, behind where my earlobe is, seems unaffected. So it's less that they moved my ear and more that they dramatically shortened it heightwise??
I still tell people that they "moved" my ear, though, because that was the impact on my life. Also it sounds funny.
There are several other impacts on my life. One is that my glasses do not sit evenly on my head. I have to adjust them pretty aggressively, sometimes. In 2020, I also discovered that my right, moved ear is not very sturdy and has a very hard time supporting tight face mask ear loops. It also gets irritated very quickly because the place where the back of my ear meets my head is not smooth and is very irregularly shaped. I had to use masks with loops that go full around the back of the head instead.
Another consequence of the surgery is that my moved right ear has... less folds?? than my left ear. Because of this, in grade school I discovered that I could stick a quarter in my right ear and it would be "held" there quite comfortably... I used this to kind of "palm" a quarter in my ear and do dumb coin tricks with it. I had a trick where I would press a quarter into the left ear, palm it in my hand, and then pull the other quarter out of my right ear. I scared the shit out of a couple other kids that way.
I recently got some in-ear headphones which are much more expensive than any other (gas-station-bought, usually) "in-ear" headphones I've ever gotten before. They are still extremely cheap as in-ears go, though - 30 dollars. (They are Salnotes Zeroes.) I got these cheap ones because I knew that getting them to fit would be a chore, and that I might just give up. I've generally avoided headphones with rubber in-ear tips before because I know that my two ears are so wildly different that I'd have to spend a bunch of time testing them out.
I was not prepared for how different my ears are. My right ear and my left ear take completely differently shaped tips. My left, untouched ear is significantly smaller and was much easier to irritate. My right, moved ear seems to be less needy. Frankenstein was immune to pain, too... maybe my ear is just so scarred up and weird it doesn't care anymore??
I am lucky that it does not look that scarred-up and weird. But I am definitely still struggling to make these headphones work!!