Edinburgh woman Matilda Lansdown, 34, who works in hair and beauty, talks about her life with a cleft lip and palate, and her work with global children’s cleft charity, Smile Train, to mark Cleft Awareness Week, May 3-10.
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00:00To mark cleft awareness week, Edinburgh woman Matilda Lansdowne, who works in hair and beauty, has been speaking about her life growing up with a cleft lip and palate.
00:11It was weird because obviously I didn't have anything else to compare it to except for what I was going through.
00:18But I always knew, you know, everything that was happening to me and everything that I felt didn't feel, it just didn't feel normal for some reason.
00:28And I think a lot of that is to do with I'm a twin and we are non-identical.
00:38And, you know, as much as I love her dearly, she, when we were kids, you know, it was a constant reminder of why me?
00:49Like, why is this happening to me?
00:50You know, I remember countless times being pulled out of school for various appointments to see various different people.
01:00And it was and then my twin, I would get home and she would be upset that I'd got to have like time out of school and I'd got to have like more attention from my parents.
01:11And I was like, are we really arguing over this?
01:15You can go to those appointments if you want.
01:17You can sit in silence and be prodded by seven doctors you've never met who don't even speak to you by your name.
01:23You know, you were at these appointments, you're basically a Petri dish or that's how it used to be anyway.
01:29Hopefully it's improved.
01:30Matilda also spoke about her work with global children's cleft charity Smile Train.
01:35But they've they've given me some amazing opportunities and and exposure and education to things that I wasn't aware of either.
01:46And, you know, I'm a great believer that, you know, I want to be a student of life forever and never being a book person.
01:55So I need to learn from from living and Smile Train, you know, what have we done with Smile Train?
02:00So I'm going to Ethiopia. So I they first found me because I started doing makeup masterclasses to fundraise.
02:13And that's how they first found me. And then they never got rid of me.
02:18And now we've done, you know, we've done campaigns like Every Three Minutes, which toured around the UK.
02:26And then they've given me lots of, you know, lots of speaking opportunities, which I really like doing.
02:56Which, again, it comes back to that fake it till you make it like I if you had asked me when I was, you know, pre pre surgeries, pre rhinoplasty, pre fake teeth.
03:08I would not be standing on stage speaking to anybody.