I am really not one for selfies, as most people know. I'm also not one for being in photographs with people at all. I know I'm not terribly pretty, which is actually fine with me, the way I look is the least interesting thing about me. And as I get older, I am more and more pleased to find that my age shelters me from things like being cat-called and expected to perform desired feminine sexuality everywhere I go. I hate this for my children, and I did my best to raise Vivi without harping on looks, but I wasn't able to raise Rhyann. While I am generally happy to not be looked at by and large anymore, there is something that happens to you emotionally when you've been left behind by society. I know that I was never really above average in the looks department, and I think this is what impacts me the most about no longer being looked at and cat called, because I know it was never my looks that made people pay attention to me, it was my youth. I was cat called because I looked young. The second I stopped looking young and started looking my age (in my very early thirties), the cat calling stopped, being hit on by men stopped, I effectively began the great disappearing.
And initially, I really fucking felt some type of way about that. It's strange how the absence of a thing that felt terrible when it was present can be upsetting instead of freeing? I felt like I was getting confirmation that I was for sure ugly, that my body was gross, that I looked like a raggedy hag. I wasn't resentful of anybody who WAS getting catcalled and hit on, I just wondered what was wrong with me. Twelve-ish years in to being socially invisible, I am no longer bothered, I DO feel free, and I talk to my children as much as possible about how their looks are the least interesting things about them. I rarely, if ever, compliment their looks (unless prompted) and focus instead on their wit, their creativity, the intangibles that aren't as consumable by predatory gazes. I want to prepare them for the reality that one day, their looks will no longer be valued because an arbitrary expiration date has been pushed on them, and that you will learn how much you actually value being an item for consumption when the appetite for you is gone.
I remember being told by several of my (male) bosses that I was hired for my looks. And I'm not even talking about the sex work jobs, because believe it or not, they do not care what you look like. Some of the most successful sex workers I ever got to know were super far from socially attractive. Every time I was told that, I stopped trying to be a good employee and I leaned in to being window dressing. If I'm being given money to be decorative, that's where my energy will go. I don't want to be thorough anymore, or smart, or prepared, I just want to be pretty. But doing that made me think twice about my own decorations. About doing to my own body what I wanted to do. I waited a LONG time to get tattoos on my arms because I knew it took away from my socially accepted prettiness. I got a facial piercing that failed several times, so it didn't take, and I never had to deal with the fallout from that at my people facing jobs, because I did it in between jobs. I kept my hair straightened instead of being curly and wild so much so that I don't recognize myself with curly hair. I only feel like I look like me when my hair is straightened. It doesn't help that Dan laughed at my hair the one time he asked me to wear it curly so he could see it, and it absolutely shattered my last shred of curly girl love I had for myself.
I'm 42 years old, and half of my life has ben spent trying to be pretty as a person who realizes she's always been the low end of average looking. I WANTED to be looked at and desired and consumed, and when it happened in the expected ways...the cat calls, the stalking, the touching without permission, the sexual assault, the overt, unaccepted consumption that all people who present as femme are expected to traverse...I fucking hated it, because I wanted to be consumed on my own terms in the ways I decided I liked. And it just doesn't work like that. I don't get to decide which ways the leopards eat my face.
But I'm now no longer a commodity, and I can be as ugly as I am, or put in as much effort into looking average as I feel like, and the only person who notices is me.
All of this is to say I did something. Something I've wanted to do for literally decades.
Here I am, a few days before. See my face? It's there! Pre-thing!
And here I am a few weeks later, post-thing!
You are going to nevermind two things:
The first is my head tilt. I don't know why I do it, it's a thing I do, I am not super hip on taking selfies and they are terrible whenever I take them. It's like you didn't even read my intro.
The second is the shadow across my nose that makes it look broken. It isn't. It's just hilarious lighting.
But I got my nostrils pierced! Hooray! I've wanted my nose pierced for fucking ages. I finally got it done and I am so happy. I'm almost healed enough to get new posts and the double chain I want that will go across my little nose bulb, my piercer said I had to wait three months and I actually just passed the three months mark last week. I was terribly worried my face would reject the piercings, but they didn't. They have stayed put, they have healed beautifully, and I am SO excited to get my nose chain. My current posts are little stars, and while I love them, they do catch on just about everything, and I've ripped my tender little nose holes a couple of times because the corner of a star has snagged on something.
Anyway, I love being in an era where I can do stuff for me because I want to and I don't have to be worried about my hirability or my looks or what a boyfriend will think. In my twenties I was so fucking afraid to turn thirty and forty and fifty and I had no idea that these years would be my favorites. The secret people should be telling femmes/girls/theys who present "feminine" is that youth is a fucking scam for people to treat you predatorily and you'll let them get away with it. People value you for your youth so they can consume it, not because it's better inherently. I have never in my life felt as good as I have in the last few years, and I have never felt as alive and real as I have coming in to my forties. I thought 23 was the end of my worthwhile years, and I am happy to report that I was only being stupid. The best shit is still coming.
43 days until our National Parks trip!!!
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