Recently, I went into a panic. Bolstered by an embarrassingly long descent into plastic surgery reels, it has come to my attention that I no longer have upper eyelids. I mean, I do, but you can’t see them. Whatever you call the skin below the eyebrow that doesn’t fold to blink, is now covering them.
I’ve compared (oh, how I’ve compared) video and photos from several months ago, from last summer. I’ve looked for times that I’ve decided were more rested, relaxed, and happier. I’ve decided that the features suddenly undesirable, now that they are permanent fixtures of my face, are due to a lack of states-of-being and states-of-mind that cannot be summoned into the present. Not by sheer will, at least, which it turns out, does not reverse the signs of aging, no matter how much I try.
I am worse off now, I assume. I’ve lost the game. My strain and stress are no longer concealed by the buoyancy of my youth. I can no longer, literally, bounce what is care-worn from my skin. It sticks. It forwards my entry into every room. Here is my face. It has lived some time now.
I fantasize about plastic surgery
I fantasize about erasing this. I watch mini-facelift before-and-afters. I watch threading procedures where surgical thread is inserted under your skin, mimicking the fascia, quickly losing youthful tension, to scaffold (temporarily) what is essentially your melting face. I realize that I’m not a wrinkler, being nearly 43 with very scant visible wrinkles, but a melter myself.
My jawline is losing clarity, and my eyebrows are perpetually nonplussed. “Where will my face be in 10 years?” I moan.
I do not think plastic surgery is shameful or inherently bad. In the age of fighting for gender-affirming surgery, supporting a person’s right to change their appearance to better suit how they feel inside, I’m all for it.
And inside, I don’t feel like a sleepy, care-worn woman who looks like she should consider hydrating and maybe using a blue light blocker. I also balk at vanity. Not in some puritan way, but there is more to life than what can be argued is culture-wide body dysmorphia; this fear of aging.
We will get old
I am deeply aware that I am obsessing because I am a cis-hetero woman, my youth, my perceived beauty, and the absence of the impression that we might live deep, challenging, and complex lives are much of our daily currency. Being described as beautiful in the very specific way that cis-hetero women are described as and allowed to be, beautiful, being described as a young woman, still holds much grief and grease for me. I have not yet passed into my “invisibility years.” I am scared to lose this.
To see reflected, as I brush my teeth, as I Zoom into a meeting, that this aspect of my life, a part of my persona as I recognize it, is drifting away, is upsetting. Face-peeled-from-your-skull consideration is upsetting. While I concede to imagining early intervention plastic surgery, we all know you cannot make an 80-year-old face look 38. You just can’t. We will get old. We will lose what we think of as our faces, our looks. It is truly the cost of life, and of living.
I have experienced more now, and it’s OK that it shows
I lift my eyebrows and consider my post-eyelid lift face. It’s more open. It looks less worn. It looks like my past. It’s aspirational. I touch the few gray hairs and consider the new hairstyle that seems to be emerging. I consider the new face that’s being revealed. I see the etches of my strain, the drag of my sorrows. When I tug my eyebrows up and stretch my forehead closer to my scalp, I attempt to trick my brain into seeing a different past, less effort, no struggle.
But it’s not true. My face made many expressions, and many were not happy, relaxed, or well-rested.
I may yet intervene on my face. I don’t want to make a blanket statement that might shift as time passes. But right now, I’m letting my eyebrows rest where they are, markers of a complex life of depth, love, care, and intention.
I am not 27 anymore. I am more able to love. I can hold more. My younger face had so much yet to do, to live, to experience. I was lighter, yes, but also less tied to the earth. I had not rooted and thus had yet to flower. I can’t slice the parts of my life I wish hadn’t happened from my history. Right now, it doesn’t make sense to slice their shadows from my skin.
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