Learning to Look at Myself

I was thirteen when I started wearing makeup. All the other girls at school were showing up with black eyeliner and bright shades of eyeshadow. Angelina Jolie was rocketing to stardom and no one could stop looking at her mouth. Everyone said plump lips were more kissable and I hadn’t been kissed yet and I wondered if in part it was because my lips seemed thin. So for a week, I did my best to calm my shaking hand as I tried to draw smooth black lines across my eyelids. I fish-puckered my lips as I traced them in red, coloring slightly outside the lines to make them look bigger. I liked painting my face, but I hated how self-conscious I was the rest of the day as I tried to remember not to touch anything or smudge my work.

The next week, I woke up one morning before school groggy and grumpy and trudged into the bathroom to begin my routine. I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was still scrunchy from sleep, and there were pillow marks on my cheek. My eyes and lips and looked so dull and colorless.

I’m ugly, I thought. And then suddenly I wanted to cry.

I thought about my grandmother, who in her seventies went each week to the hair salon to have them perm and perfectly curl her hair. She wore a plastic bonnet anytime it might rain, and she wore a little scarf at night to make sure she wouldn’t muss her hair her in her sleep. She’d giggle as she struggled to untie the knot in the morning with her crooked arthritic fingers.

My dad said he remembered one morning when my grandmother came out to the kitchen in her nightdress and no makeup. My grandfather was sitting at the table reading the paper. He glanced up at her bare face and said, “Marion, go put some color on. You look dead.” And then he went back to reading his paper.

Sometimes, when my mom was getting ready in the morning, she would get a look of despair on her face, press her cheeks with her fingertips, and say to the mirror, “I look dead.” Then she would pull out blush and swipe it so lightly on her cheeks that it was nearly invisible. I’d sit on the bathroom counter and watch her, feeling so sad that the most beautiful woman in the world didn’t see herself the way I did.

At thirteen, looking at myself that morning in the mirror, I thought, I look dead. But then I thought, Those aren’t my words.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t ugly. I decided to trust that makeup wasn’t the thing that would make me look alive. I went to school without putting any on. I felt uncomfortable, knowing my face didn’t look as artful as the other girls. But I knew I never wanted to wear makeup again if I was doing it because I thought I was ugly. I wanted to always be used to the sight of my own face.

It was another couple of decades before I realized this moment with the makeup was a microcosm of a much bigger process of self-acceptance. At thirteen, I didn’t know there would be many more times in my life when I wouldn’t like my reflection. And when I struggled to look at myself with love, I twisted and contorted myself to fit what I thought I should be. I lied. Or withdrew. Or tried to please everyone. I cried.

The lesson that took me forever to learn was there all along when I looked in the mirror at thirteen: when I don’t like what I see in myself, and I want to fix or change who I am, I have to start by learning to love what I see. I cannot change my face, or my past. If I try to fix parts of myself without really looking at them first, I may end up twisting and fixing the wrong thing—spend years editing my story when what’s really needed is to write what’s next.