How To Start Liking Your Face
You start liking your face by remembering the time as a teen when you stayed at your “pretty aunt’s” house and in the morning you saw her real face, without the glossy pink lipstick and thick foundation and blush and eye shadow and mascara.
You loved her fancy doll face framed by the blown-out hair and half-covered by giant sunglasses, sipping from a bucket-size cup of diet coke that’s 90% ice in the cupholder of the monstrous black SUV with the tinted windows. You do love that version, but what you remember most is how in the morning pretty aunt has become stunningly beautiful overnight, sitting on the couch, hair pulled back from a face that looks much softer when not outlined and filled in and textured, nursing the youngest of a gaggle of girls, one prettier than the next, all with thick, shiny hair and olive skin and impossibly long eyelashes and heart lips.
The morning, though, is quiet and gentle when they’re all bedheads and pajamas and morning breath and sleepy eyes and nobody has to be pretty yet.
You start liking your face by remembering that sunny, crisp morning in college when the hot guy walked you to class, looked at your face sideways, then did a double take and stopped in the middle of a sentence right there on the path. You have so many different colors in your eyes in the sunlight it’s incredible. You blush and stammer. It’s sweet but it also reminds you that you have your dad’s eyes. Your dad’s eyes and your mom’s expressions. You don’t like your face and the way your face moves because ohmygod you look just like your dad and ohmygod you look just like your mom and you don’t want to look like them, because, really, you don’t want to be like them.
You start liking your face by liking yourself. By accepting the DNA you were given and the parents who gave it to you. That crazy eye color and the non-existing brows and the bottom lip thicker than the top and the bad teeth that don’t care how often you floss and brush and the red Santa cheeks and the smile that makes your nose crinkle. And through this acceptance, and finally, gratitude for the parts they gave you, you become your own person and your face becomes your own face.
You start liking your face by going to the gym every day. You feel awkward because many of the women wear a full face of makeup and fix their hair and sport hundreds of dollars worth of Lululemon and you don’t. They don’t sweat like you. They don’t turn alarming shades of red. The kind of blood flow that highlights every discoloration and healing zit. The kind of deep dark red sweatiness that made your PE teacher in 7th grade ask you in front of the entire class if you had a medical problem and if you’d been seen by a doctor because this, well, this wasn’t normal.
The trash-talking gym bros with their backward baseball hats give you shit for your contorted pain face while you lift and push and pull, the forehead veins throbbing and the sweat dripping down when you’re doubled over on the turf, because you actually can’t get back up. But you don’t care because your entire face is pulsating with a heart that’s so much stronger now.
You start liking your face by seeing it in all its abnormally sweaty, abnormally red glory in the rearview mirror five days a week when you back out of the gym parking lot. You look at your face and you don’t think ugly, you don’t think gross, you don’t think fat, you don’t think old. You think of taking yourself all the way to the edge, of trying out stuff you were always afraid of, of showing up for yourself, of doing what you said you would.
Your father told you not to start wearing make-up because it would ruin your skin and your mom got mad the first time you played with her makeup and told you it would make grown men want to have sex with you. You understand a pretty face makes you more fuckable. When you go places without make-up, people respond to you differently. Mostly men. You’re acutely aware that you become instantly less fuckable. That used to bother you a lot, because you craved the validation. The need for validation is still there, but the most desperate cravings have subsided.
You start liking your face by showing up for a co-writing session first thing every morning when you spend time writing with women you adore. When you turn on your Zoom camera, your hair looks like there’s been a storm and a bird building a nest and a child pretending to be a hair dresser. Your face has a pillow crease down the left side. You’re wearing one of those zit patches that don’t do shit. You don’t know if your naked face helps you be naked in your writing, but the naked face helps you be naked in front of these women and THAT helps your writing.
You realize you have three friends now who never ever wear a stitch of makeup. Ever. They don’t announce it, they don’t judge women who do, they rarely mention it at all. It’s just what they do with their faces. They leave them bare. You love these three women for being themselves. They are living proof and permission that you, too, get to do whatever the fuck you want with your face.
You remember you used to love the ritual of looking at your face in the mirror as a blank canvas you could turn into something else. It used to be fun. It’s still fun sometimes, but not as much and not as often and there have been glimpses of Oh actually, I prefer the ‘as is’ version today. One time you meet a friend and she comments on how pretty you look that day and you say without thinking that you felt so shitty that you tried extra hard to make yourself look pretty, because you wanted to hide.
You start liking your face by spending so many hours and days crying off make-up that it’s started to feel pointless to put on. The blotchy neck, mascara-streaked cheeks, and puffy lids have become familiar. You’ve had many ‘ugly cries’ until one friend mentions that ‘ugly cries’ are ‘free cries.’ Your face has so graciously absorbed the floods of salt water, so patiently witnessed the pain, so lovingly allowed you to free yourself from pretty, from put-together, from the mask of everything is fine.
You’re starting to like your face because you’re starting to like yourself.
You’re starting to like your face because your default isn’t covering it up anymore, whether you’re sweaty or tired or crying and laughing with your mouth open so wide people can see your crowns.
You’re starting to like your face because you’ve become familiar with it which creates a new level of intimacy with yourself.
Dr. Carlota Batres says: "In a world where it is said that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', it might actually be that 'beauty is in the faces of those we behold,' since we grow to like those around us."1 That now includes your own face.
You’re starting to like your face because you know it’s not necessary to be or feel or look “pretty” to like it.
You start liking your face that moment your elementary school kid spots you in the audience at the recital and their face lights up in a way that rips your heart into bloody confetti and you see your “hurt my kid and I will end you” desperate kind of love turned into something so purely innocent and joyful on their face that you believe in humanity again.
You start liking your face when you remember the way you look at your baby is the way your mom used to look at you, and the way your sister looks at you when you pick her up from the airport and when you drop her back off there, and the way you look at your best friend across a crowded room and see the same fucked up thought mirrored on their face and you have an entire conversation just with your eyebrows.
You start liking your face when you hold it into the sun in that warm spot on the front porch underneath the flowers, and when you get caught in the rain while paddling on a lake with your person and he’s laughing and you’re laughing and you’re screaming into the wind, while the sky is drowning your face.
You start liking your face because it’s yours.
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This made me laugh:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-05-beauty-beholderfamiliar.html
Beautiful! All 4 of your faces that you shared and your lovely writing ✍️
Beautiful. Just like your face.