Your Skin Looks Great! What's Your Secret!?

Do you want the funny answer, the polite answer, or the real answer?

The other day I was chatting with an old acquaintance while running errands in town. She was a decade or two older than me, extroverted and bubbly, and we hadn’t spoken in years, not since I was a regular at the town brewery.

In the middle of our conversation she interrupted to say, “…by the way, your skin looks great! What’s your secret!?” to which I flatly replied “Do you want the funny answer, the polite answer, or the real answer?”

She wanted all of them.

The funny answer: There are no men or children in my life.

The polite answer: I stopped drinking alcohol, get enough sleep, drink at least 2 liters of water a day, and am diligent about my retinol serum.

The real answer: I was raised to be so ashamed of my physical appearance, that since I was prepubescent, I’ve worn a hide of foundation so thick it rivaled seal blubber. My face hasn’t felt actual sunshine on it until I got on antidepressants last year. I was 41 years old.

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Full disclosure, when this past conversation happened it wasn’t anything near that eloquent. Also, I was an hour out of the shower, fresh as a daisy. I had just applied a redness-reducing/pore-filling primer, the correct slightly-lighter-than-my-skin-tone concealer under my eyes blended into a light foundation on my cheeks and nose, blush for suggested contouring, filled-in eyebrows, and waterproof mascara. The kind of makeup that doesn’t look like makeup to people who don’t wear makeup. Or rather, the kind of makeup that passes for smoother, younger, skin in the shade to someone standing seven feet away.

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It wasn’t that long ago a compliment in the wild about my appearance would throw me into a tailspin. I’ve hated any comment about my body since I was old enough to understand I was being perceived. It meant people were looking at me, judging me, comparing me to standards I had no control over and could never achieve.

But after this interaction, I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t feel better about myself because I understand how I solicited the compliment with hygiene and diet drag.

I also didn’t feel bad that someone took the time to regard me. I didn’t give the tiniest shit if this lady thought I was the most beautiful woman on earth or Baba Yaga. It wasn’t interesting.

No one’s opinion on how I look is interesting anymore, and it took four decades and synthetic serotonin to get there.

The Friendly Beast

I remember seeing Beauty and the Beast in the theaters, feeling like the only 9-year-old girl in the world that related more to the Beast than Belle.

The Beast was me. Strong, self-loathing, really into smart femmes, and rocked a considerable underbite. Belle looked like the real girls in my grade. What I was supposed to be. But I wasn’t a girl. I was a monster.

When I look back at pictures of my childhood, most of them portray a normal looking kid, even though I felt wrong as long as I can remember. But when I reached puberty, earlier than most girls in my class I started to physically morph into how I felt. I was never allowed to forget it.

By fourth grade my acne was so bad parents of classmates would pull me aside at Girl Scouts and ask if I had a disease, worried their kid would catch it if they kept playing with me.

I felt bad about my skin so I ate to feel better. I knew it was shameful so I stole cookies and ate them alone in my room. Chewing them was the only time I felt numb enough to not feel the sadness. I soon became the chubbiest female in a household where women being unattractive was a minor felony.

Years of wearing braces couldn’t repair my underbite, nor convince me my teeth were anything but jagged Chiclets. I’ve never smiled in a way that shows teeth with a closed mouth in living memory. I don’t even know how to do that. When I try it looks like a horse eating peanut butter.

By Jr High other girls were into ballet and boys. I was into doing enough pushups to impress my tae kwon do instructor. Genes really do control the lion’s share of traits and while my looks weren’t strong, my body was. It was the one thing I was proud about as a kid. It made me feel safer, but even that was laced with shame. My arms were too big to share clothes with my friends. Half of those arms were muscle. The other half, double-stuffed Oreo’s.

The Friendly Beast was even my middle-school nickname—a moniker the boys in my grade called me in comparison to my sister—a blonde high school cheerleader. I know this because they said it to my face, a harmless nickname based on an obvious trait, like calling the left-handed kid Lefty.

Kids aren’t cruel. They’re honest. I was a friendly beast. I was amicable and funny. I was a good hang. I was also a beastly girl. I wasn’t taking care of myself because I didn’t think I deserved it. What’s the point of crimping the hair on a St. Bernard?

I was bulimic by 13. I was losing hair and teeth by 20. The entire time, no matter how hard I purged or how depressed I became, I could never turn myself into the butterfly I thought I had to become to feel loved.

This was my life as a young woman. It felt like my sadness was punishment for not having enough the will to starve or money to get veneers.

It wasn’t until (fairly) recently when I went through the lowest years of my life that I was able to turn things around. A dear friend convinced me to talk to a doctor. She loved me enough to encourage me to get help, talk to someone, start to leave the house, try medication and find the person she used to know. She missed me.

I did, too.

Taking Out the Trash

Earlier today I made the trip my local transfer station, colloquially known as the dump. I had a carload of oversized trash bags and mixed recyclables, my usual haul for the month.

I had messy hair off my neck with a french side comb, no makeup, and my oversized purple glasses. I was wearing chore overalls and a lavender tank top. I probably smelled like manure and the bacon I made for lunch. The heat had me sweating bullets. Not exactly the height of womanly grace.

Anyone who saw me would see exactly what I was: a farmer in the middle of her work day. They possibly judged my exposed armpit hair, or the hormonal garden of zits on my chin, but if they did that was their problem. I was loading stinky trash out of my car in the middle of a heatwave and I wasn’t showering and putting on a full face of make up for neighbors that had to witness my unacceptably-feminine body for the eight minutes I was there.

Before, I would have never left the house like that. I would rather crash my car than another human being see my body without the rituals I desperately performed to feel acceptable in public: the thick makeup, the contacts, the hair extensions… all of it coward’s armor trying to protect myself from myself. I thought if I was trying, if I made an effort to appear as fuckable as possible to the male gaze, that people wouldn’t feel about me the way I did.

I don’t know why we do this, to ourselves or each other. Why we think we need to look anything but healthy and happy with ourselves as ourselves. My body has changed for the better since getting on medication, but it happened slowly. It wasn’t forced out of me bent over the toilet or drawn across my face - it was because I finally knew I deserved to be loved exactly as I was, even if the only love I got was from myself. Myself was plenty!

And a few years of better habits, less vices, and forgiving myself goes a long way on delaying forehead lines.

I am not pretty. I am not rich. I am not tall, or thin, or particularly athletic. But I am perfect. Every inch of me, every scar from being a range animal by choice and every busted tooth I lovingly endeavor to keep in my skull. Every hair, pimple, blemish and mottling is part of the person who spent her life healing broken pieces of herself on a farm with its own creek.

For years, I was faking it until I made it.

I made it.

The Secret

My skin is healthier than before. The secret is actually dealing with my shit. That’s the secret to everything in this circus. Find out who you actually are and you don’t need other people to tell you, convince you, sell it to you, or save you.

I don’t want to hold onto that sad girl who spent most of her life trying to be anyone else. Trying to look young, thin, straight, and pretty—as if envy ever equated happiness. I let go of the need for stranger’s approval once it was blessedly useless to me. I allowed myself to not place too much self worth on empty compliments. Now they feel like driving a new car off the lot; euphoric at first, then instantly depreciated in value.

And I know there are people who will never get there, will never realize they were already perfect and capable of being loved. They will sit in the passenger seat of their mid-sized luxury SUVs at the dump and scrunch up their nose at the feral dyke with hairy armpits and zero Lancome. And they will turn to their spouses in the driver’s seat with an anger they don’t understand, and will speak the truth about me through gritted teeth as if it’s an insult:

“She let herself go.”