Don't Erase those Smile Lines

On beauty interventions, aging faces, and coming to terms with your inner teenager

Dear Ones,

Last week Freddi asked me what a vampire facial was.  He’d seen a text come in from my friend who had gotten one that day. 

Now, I’m no beauty routine expert by any stretch of the imagination – I shave periodically, enjoy expensive lotion, wear a little mascara and maybe some eyeshadow – so I quickly looked it up.

Well, I said, explaining it as well as I could to a nine year old boy who is into turtle-catching, basketball, and Legos.  It’s a procedure people do when they want their face to look better.  A doctor pricks their skin with lots of needles and then injects part of their own blood back into their body.

Freddi’s mouth dropped open. And someone pays for that?

Yeah, I said.  Sometimes up to a few thousand dollars.

But why?!

I clicked the Allure magazine article and read some of the benefits.  Better skin tone.  A more youthful and vibrant look.  The healing of old scars and skin damage.  I explained that my 51-year-old friend said she hoped it would give her face a fresher, more plumped up look.    

Did it?  He asked. 

I didn’t tell him that for now she felt she looked like pummeled hamburger meat.  That she was too embarrassed to send me a pic. 

I think it takes awhile before it looks good, I said vaguely.

Oh, he said, losing interest, and then in an ill-advised moment compelled by some combination of tiredness, loneliness, and boredom I asked, What do you think about my face?  Do you think I look old?  To which he responded, cheerfully and naively, Sure, you look old. 

I do?  I said, feeling a little heartsick, but also knowing that any child would, of course, think I look old, and so I asked him to compare.  Did I look older than my vampire facial friend, who is four years older than me?  He thought for a second, studying me closely, and then said, Yeah, you do look older. 

My slightly sick feeling turned to a searing resistance in me, a pain like liquid nitrogen burning off one of my many spots of actinic keratosis.  The poison that is comparison-mind seeped in, and I couldn’t stop myself.  I dove in for more.

 And do you think I look older than… I paused…  Juju?!  

Some context.  Julie - called Juju by my son - is my sister, who at nineteen months my senior is more like a twin, who has always been my number one go-to for unconscious comparison.  Also a yoga teacher.  A wellness coach and dietician.  A cookbook author.  A gorgeous mother of three teenage children who bicycles around New York City teaching clients, who in the middle of her day might swing through The Whitney Museum for an exhibit, pick up ingredients to make an 8-quart batch of soup for her family and a few friends, and finish the night at The Joyce with a modern dance performance.  She does this, by the way, without an active social media account and never posting one iota about it anywhere, anytime.  Why?  Because she’s living it, not caring about being seen living it.

A little more context. As teenagers while my sister studied Seventeen Magazine and Art News, ever interested in fashion and design, I sought trees to talk to and was busy competing in our local library’s reading competitions, devouring everything I could from C.S. Lewis to Sweet Valley High, Jane Austen to Jack Kerouac.  While my sister shopped at Glenbrook Mall, saving her babysitting money to buy a super hip pink jean jacket from The Gap, I begged to be dropped off at Walden Books, spending money on Kurt Vonnegut books and Mary Higgens Clark mysteries.  While my sister spent an hour curling, arranging, and shellacking her hair into a signature six-inch 1989-cool helmet – and getting TONS of positive attention for it! - I spent ten minutes on my bangs, winging them up and out into a brick wall and letting the rest of my hair lay unattended, lank, and neglected.  Maybe no one would notice my half-hearted effort? 

(the big hair years…also the christian jazz dance years)

Well, I’m here to say they did not notice. And not in a good way.  Because while I was uninterested in any of the efforts it would take to overcome my unruly red hair and smooth out my loudly freckled skin, I wanted very very badly to be perceived of as beautiful, to be desirable and preferred by the boys.  But why couldn’t I have that while just living my life and letting God’s inherent natural design be enough?!  For years and years I nursed the belief that I was not the beautiful one, that was not my lot in life, and it would take a special rare someone to love the way I looked, and along with that painful, delusional thought, I developed a shell of a belief that I was the poetic one, I was deep, and I would rather suffer my lonely awkwardness (oh, dear middle school martyr that I was!) than tinker endlessly with such superficial things as eye enhancement and cheekbone drama.

(Halloween, 2012. Me as Andy Warhol. Julie as the gorgeous Nico. A pretty good illustration of our personas.)

It's another story how I came to realize all of that was totally bunk, but the heart of that melodramatic twelve year old lives on in me in surprising ways, groomed by a wider culture that holds impossibly high and twisted standards for women.  

Back to the dangerous question.  Do I look older than juju?

Without hesitation, without noticing that I was about to burst open like skin pricked by countless needles.   Freddi said, Oh, yes, definitely. 

Silence.  Aging 47 year old with an inner insecure 12 year fully online.

You sound kind of mad, Freddi said nervously.   Or maybe sad.  Or… I don’t know…?  He trailed off, bless his highly attuned little heart.

Yes, I was mad.  Not mad at him for saying the truth, not mad at Juju for looking so good, not mad at my friend or any individual who seeks these interventions.  I was mad about something insidious, pervasive, and systemic.  The Beauty Industry in general.  The Patriarchy in general.  The Judgment of Women’s Appearances, in general.  The Human Instinct to Try to Defy Death and Hide from the Truth, in general.  The Elevation of the External Over the Internal, in general.

Yes, I was sad.  Sad for the younger me who longed for feedback.  Sad that anyone should be made to feel that they need to tinker so intrusively -  and so expensively! - with what’s on the outside of their body in order to feel beautiful or to receive approval.   Sad that anyone should be made to feel that they need to freeze their muscles with poison and hide the truth of their age – their sunspots and eye lines - to be considered interesting and worthy of curiosity.  Sad that anyone – and, let’s face it, I’m talking mainly about women - should be made to feel invisible or ugly after a certain age because they have pouches of sagging skin and wrinkles around their mouths but aging men, on the other hand, are seen as holding gravitas and importance when their hair grays and their brow furrows.   

And yes, I could finish the sentence for him.  I was confused. Confused that Freddi saying I looked old made me feel so, so bad.  Confused about my own mixed feelings and the parts of me that have bought in, have participated in all of the systems.  Confused by how disappointed I can feel when I look at my face.  By how I want to look plumped up and refreshed, too.  By how I want to calm the furrow in my forehead.  By how I want my mouth to be unmarred by the pucker of tiny wrinkles, my eyes to be unshaded by circles, and my cheeks clear of sun damage.  Confused by how certain beauty ads can really seduce me.  Those before and after photos of miracle lotions on Instagram, for instance. And bewildered by how I once spent $100 on a special essential oil and gua-sha massage tool to “enliven” my face and “naturally” decrease the signs of aging.  Which I - because I couldn’t be bothered as a teenager and I certainly can’t be bothered now as a single mom working from home - gave up on that evening ritual after three nights.

And then I remembered to breathe, and under the appropriate anger, surrounding the appropriate sadness, holding the understandable confusion, something bigger and older and timeless and infinite came into view. 

I’m sorry, Mama, Freddi said, hugging me tightly.  I didn’t mean you’re not pretty.  I think you’re very pretty.

Pretty and old, I laughed, finding my footing in this bigger, spacious love that unfolds from the inside-out. I’ll take it.

Ok, he said, a little unsure whether he should say anything at all. 

I love your truthful heart, I told him, More than anything! And we hugged for another minute until he was so over this conversation - so so so so over it! - that he gently removed himself and announced he was going to go shoot some baskets.

There’s this scene in the movie Wonder when Auggie, the fifth-grade main character who was born with a severely deformed face,  is suffering after a painful day at school. 

Why do I have to be so ugly? he weeps.  He explains to his mother that people won’t even look at him, they won’t even try to get to know him because all they see is his face.  Is it always going to matter?!

Honey, I don’t know, his mom says.  But listen to me. We all have marks on our face.  I have this wrinkle here from your first surgery and I have these wrinkles here from your last surgery.

Then she points to her heart and says, This is the map that shows us where we’re going.  Then she points to her face and says, And this is the map that shows us where we’ve been… and it’s never ever ugly. 

My own face traces a textured, wild journey with tons of unexpected side roads and detours.  While, sure, there is a deeply conditioned part of me that wants to be perceived as beautiful by the wider world – and for middle aged women like me, that means being perceived as young, untouched by time, and youthful in a tasteful, just the right amount kind of a way -  what’s more true for me is the  desire to feel beauty, to experience my life as beautiful from within, a glow that expands from the heart.  And my face is the reflection of that beautiful heart-centered life. 

It tells the story of every wide-eyed, crinkle faced guttural laugh-cackle.  The story of every puffy-eyed, agonizing, heartbroken sob.  The story of every all-nighter I’ve pulled:  when my child needed me, when I had a writing project to finish, when I had a new love to consummate.  The story of a big, expansive life, one lived largely outdoors, in the open air, buried once in stinging nettles I thought were just lovely flowers, covered in poison ivy more times I can count, burned to a crisp after weeks spent traveling on a motorcycle. The story of a face who has survived and thrived in all kinds of weather, who has been through things.

The mountains are whole and beautiful for one principal reason, writes the poet Stephen Nightengale in The Paradise Notebooks about his 90-mile walk in the Sierra Nevadas. They have been broken so often.

He goes on to say, It is the very breaking and jointing, the cracking and carving breakdown, the weathering and scouring, that all together give rise to the countless forms of beauty – iridescent, miraculous, gift-giving, exultant – throughout the whole of the range.

What broken, weathered, scarred parts of you weigh down your psyche?  What do you often want to scrub down, gloss up, smooth away, or hide from others?  How would that  desire change if you saw your face as the story of your life, an inspiring piece of theater, a riveting novel, a gorgeous operatic score, a breath-taking vista?  Would you remember then that those broken and healed things, those unique marks, are what give rise to your beauty? 

When I was 27 I went to my dermatologist to ask if she would remove a mole from my cheek.  It wasn’t a health concern, but I had always found it troubling.  A weird mark.  Ugly.  Different.  The dermatologist looked concerned.  She told me about the scar it would leave, a different kind of mark, she called it.  An absence of something.

Besides, she said.  That mole makes your face really interesting.  It’s yours.

I kept the mole and never saw it the same way again.  No longer an unwanted growth, something different and, therefore ugly, it became a signature, a mark of my unique beauty.  Sometimes it’s necessary, writes the poet Galway Kinnell, to reteach a thing its loveliness… from an act of self-blessing.

I realized then, in some small way, that I didn’t need to find someone out there, someone special and rare, to find me lovely. In fact, I am that special, rare someone, only I can love myself from the inside out. There’s only one of these faces in all the world, only one of each of our stories ever! How do we want to consider these faces? With what energy? What attention?

For me, I want to live from the inside-out, letting my heart guide me from my deepest values, from tender presence with all the parts of myself, however young and melodramatic. I want to let it steer me towards a life well-lived, conscious, bold, and awake to my whys, my hows, my true intentions. I want to show my face to the world, not because I seek approval. No. That will never satisfy. I want to show my face to the world because I’m here, and I have a story. A story that tells of one who cared and cares. Who cares deeply enough to be cracked open again and again and to be healed again and again. Who is brave enough to let the light shine through, illuminating the breaks and the fixes, the history and the presence, the sorrow and the joy. In other words, the beauty.

With smile lines etched deep, a few chin hairs sprouting from an old scar, and plenty of beauty-mark moles on my face, I am yours as a mountain range of love,

Sara

(just an outdoor face, living and loving from the light)