Reid Ewing, the actor who played Sarah Hyland's on-and-off again boyfriend on the hit series Modern Family, may have seemed like a pretty happy-go-lucky guy. But it turns out he was only playing one on television.Ewing recently wrote a heartbreaking essay on The Huffington Post about his struggles with cosmetic surgery and self-acceptance, which he was enduring while filming the ABC show."In 2008, when I was 19 years old, I made my first appointment to meet with a cosmetic surgeon. I genuinely believed if I had one procedure I would suddenly look like Brad Pitt," he wrote. What came next was a series of painful surgeries that left him emotionally isolated, disfigured, and deeply unhappy.Once the swelling went down from his first surgery — cheek implants — he remembers his face looking like "the lower half of my cheeks were as hollow as a corpse's" and returning to the doctor, who refused to operate on him for another six months. Ewing then sought out a second surgeon, who suggested another implant, which the actor later discovered wasn't properly affixed under his skin."For the next couple of years, I would get several more procedures with two other doctors. Each procedure would cause a new problem that I would have to fix with another procedure," Ewing writes. At the time, he was only 20 years old.We highly recommend reading the entire piece , in Ewing's words, on The Huffington Post, which he wrote after seeing the doctor — who performed his first surgery —share cosmetic enhancement advice in a magazine article and on a talk show. "This is written to counter his influence," the actor, who has returned to school in Utah, explains. "Before seeking to change your face, you should question whether it is your mind that needs fixing."