Real-life Wonder child
After years of being tormented for the way she looked, this brave woman has finally come out the other side smiling
It’s hard for Olivia Hotschilt to forget her traumatic childhood, sitting alone at lunch time, listening to kids in the playground call her nasty names and crying in her mum’s lap after school.
Just like young Auggie in the film Wonder, Olivia, 22, suffers from the rare genetic disorder craniofrontonasal dysplasia.
The condition saw parts of her skull fuse prematurely, leaving her with eyes spaced wide apart, and no nasal bridge.
TRAUMATIC TIME
Olivia says in addition to the hurtful comments she faced as a child simply because of the way she looked, sometimes the abuse even turned physical.
“Schoolkids used to tell me nobody would ever love me and I should kill myself, and that I looked like an alien. They tied my legs together and threw me down the stairs,” Olivia, from Alstonville in NSW says as she stares at the scars that refuse to fade.
Olivia battled so much from her condition at such a tender age her parents sought reconstructive surgery when she was five, in the hope of improving her quality of life.
“They remodelled my entire face. I don’t think I’d have been able to survive if I went through life looking the way I did,” she says.
While Olivia grappled with the trauma of being bullied for most of her school life, things started looking up after she had her fourth and final round of surgery to reconstruct her face at the age of 16. She changed schools and finally found peers who loved her, regardless of her differences.
“I met people who I could call my true friends. They loved me and genuinely cared how I was doing,” she says, with a smile.
In the process of overcoming great adversity and moving on with life, retail assistant Olivia says she finally learned to love herself. And with her newfound confidence she’s now convinced no dream is unachievable. “I have big plans. I’m saving money to travel to New Zealand next year, and I’m also working towards buying my own house,” she says.
But first, she’s going to see Wonder with the friends who helped change her world. “I’ll have the tissue box ready,” she says.