Everything I've had injected into my face lately
I was feeling vulnerable - so I went in for fillers.
Yeah, so: like I say, I was feeling vulnerable. Oh, it’s the book. The Book! Publication day (for How The Female Body Works, pre order here, or signed copies here) just looms.
June 26th.
People keep asking if I’m excited. I’m not. It feels doomy; like the inexorable march toward exams. It’s because of what happened with the last one - also, because of Glennon Doyle.
Delving in to that made me feel like crap. All too familiar by half. Too close (even though what happened to me, happened ten years ago).
My head knows its really unlikely my new book will get me half-destroyed on the internet once again. Sure, I’m publishing a book about women's bodies at a time when the subject could not be more contentious, but: this one isn’t as personal as the first, it doesn’t have my damn face on the cover, and it is no longer quite as fashionable to hate me.
I don’t think?
My nervous system however, understands - based on past experience - that there’s only one possible outcome to publishing a book, and that is: get harangued by hundreds of strangers on the internet, then descend into a pit of shame-addled despair, from which it’ll take you a full year (and a lot of therapy) to crawl.
Because I am A Woman, and because - when we’re not externalising our insecurities by heaping loathing on a stranger because she seem to have the things in which we feel we ourselves revoltingly lacking - we tend to internalise our insecurities. We tend to beat ourselves up particularly, about how we look.
And so it was that I started beating myself up, about how I look.
Then I called Dr Suha Kersh, one of, if not the, best aesthetician in London (and now, Dubai). She’s been treating me since 2019 - botox, filler, and anything else she rates - and her work is the kind which makes people think you haven’t had anything done at all, you just look miraculously fresh.
I trust her implicitly. This has probably never been more important, than it is right now.
Generally, I rail against the idea that women only ever have aesthetic tweakments, because, on some level, they hate themselves. I’ve said it before, and I shall undoubtedly say it again, but:
Of all those many, many women, who have ever told me they are “against” cosmetic surgery in all its forms, that women should be capable of valuing themselves without it, of loving themselves, regardless… Not a single one has ever struck me as more confident, or happier, or capable of loving herself, than me - a woman who happily, regularly gets Botox and the rest.
Yet - right now, I know that I am not especially confident. I know, deep down, that I am not seeking cosmetic intervention for the right reasons, which are: to boost all the things I already love about my face, to take the edge of wrinkles, but leave me entirely capable of emotional expression, to make me feel sexier, stronger, cooler again, than I already did….
No. Now? I am seeking cosmetic intervention for the wrong reasons: because I am scared about being judged by strangers on the internet when my new book comes out.
Happily, Dr Kersh’s entire MO is to help women look good only so that they feel good, not so they end up pleasing anyone else, or complying with anyone else’s idea of how they should look, or because they think changing the way they are on the outside could ever hope to heal what’s broken in them, on the inside… This means that, even if I’m not making the best calls right now, she will, on my behalf.
(As an aside: she is also staggeringly beautiful, most encouraging in a person charged with juzjing your beauty.)
I tell her about my… situation. Tell her I want filler.
She tilts her head to one side, contemplates my face like the artist she is.
“No,” she says. “We’re not going to do filler. We are not going to give anyone an excuse to say you look overdone.” She pauses. “I have a much better idea.”