Laura Lee Lewis was born with midface hypoplasia. The condition caused the bones in her chin to overdevelop and the bones at the center of her face to underdevelop.
“It caused my face to look a little different than normal faces look, and people, mean people, made notice of that,” Lewis told WAPT.
The bullying was endless when she was a little girl. So much so she would run away to the bathroom to cry at school.
“You know, ‘Why does your face look like that? Why are you so ugly? Horse face, chinny chin,’” Lewis recalled the insults thrown at her.
Lewis began to channel her sadness into singing to escape from her bullies. That was when her friends encouraged her to enter Miss Mississippi's Outstanding Teen pageant. On her second try, she won.
“I would’ve never thought it would have happened, because as a little girl, I wasn’t considered beautiful to many,” Lewis said. “That proved to me, I was doing something right, regardless of what I looked like, I was making a difference."
Today, Lewis is Miss Mississippi and will be competing in the Miss America Pageant. After high school, Lewis was able to get corrective surgery — a process that took a year to recover from. Still, Lewis believes that her formative years, the time when she was painfully bullied, the time when she entered a beauty pageant while others called her 'ugly,' was the most important time of her life.
“I learned something so valuable — that it’s what’s inside that’s so much more important than what’s outside,” she said.
Please SHARE if you believe Lewis was courageous to get on that stage and prove her bullies wrong.
