Today, I Hated My Face
A personal piece about a moment of self hatred.
Pathetic I know, but it's true.
How sad. How ridiculous. How utterly mortifying.
As I applied my make up this morning, rushing so I could get out of the house on time for the daily school run grind, I gazed at my reflection in the mirror and thought... gosh, what a horrible sight. There was nothing to make me feel this way. Nothing on my face had changed overnight. I looked pretty much the same as I always do and yet, this morning for a brief moment, I turned against my own face and was savage in my opinion of it. Yes, today I hated my face.
Whilst I'm really quite ashamed to admit this, I suspect I'm not the only woman to think like this on occasion which is why I've decided to share my moment of darkness. Where do these moments of self hatred come from, I wonder? And why are we women generally so unforgiving and so unkind to ourselves?
Some would perhaps blame social media for its' polished and filtered content that continues to set impossibly high standards that we can never reach (nor should probably ever want to.) Others would suggest social media itself is not the problem, but the female influencers who continually peddle it.
Many would argue that actually, the fault lies with our culture. A culture which endlessly criticises women and finds fault with us, no matter what we do. A culture that expects us to jump through hoops to be acceptable yet is forever changing the size of the god damn hoop.
You only have to look at how celebrities are lambasted for being too thin or too fat, for looking too young or too old, to know that we can never win. As for me? Well I would say all of this is very valid.
Only the other day, I went onto Instagram and was greeted with a feed that included numerous promoted posts from local plastic surgery companies. Posts never seen previously are now always popping up in my feed even though they're actually the last businesses I would personally ever follow.
The message is clear.
Treat yourself to some 'work', get rid of a 'turkey neck' or at the very least smooth those wrinkles out. Yep, now I'm in my mid forties, this targeting and push of such content, definitely feels personal.
But also, I have to acknowledge that my moment of self hatred came from within me. So like it or not, I have to accept that there is clearly something that needs to be looked at. Some inner work I need to do.
At 45, I would have thought and hoped that I'd have been done with feeling insecure about my looks by now ( especially as I've spent so many years working on myself to really try and make that happen) but it appears that even the smallest of chinks in your armour can leave you vulnerable to an enemy.
My moment of self hatred might be hard for me to stomach but it shows that I am still cleaning up the mess and wiping away the ever prevailing expectations of perfection that occasionally haunt me. That haunt us all I guess, in some way, as women.
Thankfully - even with my moment of face hatred- those plastic surgery adverts that keep being pushed into my Instagram feed still don't appeal. They just make me feel incredibly sad.
Women's faces don't need to be fixed or tweaked or altered. They just need to be accepted and if possible, loved and not by anyone else, but by ourselves. I guess this is the goal. The holy grail.
To be able to see our own beauty clearly and to know our worth doesn't lie in how unlined our skin is or how perfect our features are, but in the very fact that we merely exist and have a right to.
Today I hated my face. But tomorrow? I'm going to do my damndest to try and love it.
This post was originally published on my blog Daring Eileen.
I can completely relate. I think mine's normal related. A comforting read!