(This post is the expanded version of my last post which you can read here.)
I was 26 when I bought my first tube of lipstick. After days of sneaking to the counter to try it on the make up artist, a gorgeous girl with perfect eyelashes and a remarkably contoured face, told me to “just buy it.” I loved the deep pinky colour and how it somehow made my cheekbones pop. After minutes of debating and shamefully looking for an exit from the make up artist’s gaze, I pulled up my big girl panties and took the lipstick tube to the check out.
All my life I have struggled with acne, being overweight and having crooked teeth. Playgrounds and high school hallways aren’t nice to you when you look like that. They are even meaner to creative souls who just want to express themselves and can’t understand the status quo. I have spent a great deal of my life wishing I was someone else. I moved through life too afraid to embrace what I really wanted because I always believed that somehow I wasn’t pretty enough to deserve it.
I first embraced make up because it was a mask to hide behind. It was something to cover up my inherent ugliness. It became a way for me to blend into the background and hide from my hideous exterior. I thrived in small classes, with small groups of friends and small dreams, because that was easier than facing the big, wide world of beautiful people.
In this small world I had created, a crack was growing, a grumbling was beginning to shake the foundations and voices were getting louder and too hard to ignore. During this time I followed my heart, and on a whim, I quit university and enrolled in hair dressing school. It was in part because I was tired of writing inconsequential papers and stressing out over midterms and finals; but it was also in part to see beauty close up and marvel at its greatness. I figured that if I couldn’t be beautiful and if I couldn’t run in beautiful circles then I could at least have a front row seat as it passed by.
The first few months of hairdressing school were hard, but mostly because my ideas of women and beauty were taking a pounding. By the time second term came around and there were clients in my chair I spent most of my time fighting to keep the anger, that was growing in my core, to stay there. I was dealing with beautiful women everyday who refused to see themselves for who they were and live up to their potential. All I was hearing was what they hated about themselves.
Now, I might be an intelligent girl, but sometimes I’m not very smart. I worked behind the chair for a long time before I began to see myself in these women. I was just like them, unable to see past the ways I didn’t measure up. When I finally figured it out I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I wanted to throw up while running away from my problem and never again look in a mirror or step inside a salon. I knew that I had a lot of work to do on my heart and on my way of thinking. I knew that in order to maintain momentum and to force myself to figure some things out I needed a challenge. A way to push myself on this quest for beauty and to force myself to open my eyes to truths that I had chosen to remain blind to for so many years.
I walked into the local esthetics school and enrolled in a makeup module. Now, the teaching wasn’t amazing (actually I spent about as much time with an instructor as a fish does applying lipliner) and there wasn’t a great amount of theory or direction (except for a stack of VHS tapes with really controversial names like, “Black Glamour” and “Oriental Persuasion”) but I poured myself into makeup artistry books by industry greats like Kevyn Aucoin and I began to experiment, not in covering up women’s faces but in enhancing them. I learned how to apply liquid liner, how to contour a face and how to bring cheekbones out from hiding. I loved playing with colors and shadows until one day I was brave enough to do it on myself.
You wouldn’t believe how shy I was to wear false eyelashes for the first time, or to use an eye liner or to even purchase my first tube of lipstick (It was Caprice by Stila, in case you wanted to know) but slowly I learned that make up could be used to enhance the beauty that I already possessed despite of (or maybe even because of) my crooked teeth, excess weight and constant battle with acne. I learned to see that underneath my acne where chiseled cheekbones and in front of my crooked teeth were beautifully full lips and that what showed more than the extra pounds I carried around my midsection were big, expressive brown eyes. I realized that if I wasn’t going to claim my beauty and live in such a way that expressed it no one else would. And that my beauty would fade from this earth just as fast as summer slips from a child’s grasp. I knew that if my cheekbones, lips and big brown eyes were gifts from God then one day He would ask me what I did with them and why I wasted such beautiful resources. And that just wasn’t a conversation I was looking forward to.
So, now I play with make up; I don’t hide behind it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for concealer on “bad acne” days and I am grateful for false eyelashes when mine feel a little thin and I know that I have a long way ahead of me in terms of living my most beautiful life but I am miles ahead of where I used to be and that is amazing. I am learning everyday that we all have things that we don’t like about ourselves but that for every one of those things are two or three more beautiful pieces to our puzzle and that is what we need to focus on and bring to light because no one else will.
No one else can be your kind of beautiful, they are too busy being their own kind of beautiful. You are too precious, too unique to hide shamefully in a corner. I’m not saying it will be easy, I am saying that it will be worth it.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” -Marianne Williamson
