Hot Girl Summer

I left my marriage by degrees in a process that took years from start to finish.  We’d decided to separate at the beginning of COVID, and because of everything happening plus issues with illness in the family, we lived in the same house.   I lived upstairs, he lived downstairs.  We shared a kitchen.   Obviously, there was a lot of “family life” happening but we were physically and emotionally severed from each other.   It took over three years from the point of initial separation for us to live separately, so by the time that happened I had already processed everything and was ready to date.   I figured I'd start with dating apps, just like everyone else.

When I thought about dating apps, I realized I didn’t have any good pictures of myself to put on them.   For years, I’d been avoiding allowing people to photograph me.  And I didn’t know how to take selfies. So I started out by learning to take selfies.   I’d go for a walk every single day for an hour or so to visit the rose gardens in my neighborhood.  And I’d take selfies.   They were horrible, I had no idea what I was doing.  I didn’t know my best angles.  I didn’t know how to make them look natural and not posed.  And there was something else… I didn’t know how to smile.  

When I was young, I was mercilessly teased about an overbite and so learned to keep my mouth tightly closed almost all of the time.  Combined with the stress and grief which had kept me wearing tense facial expressions for most of my life, the result is that the muscles had strengthened so that my mouth was narrow and tight. When I tried to smile in pictures, I looked like a constipated cyborg.   “This is not good,” I thought to myself.  And immediately got to work googling how to smile.   There I learned about how Kate Moss smiles.  I learned the chin on the ledge technique.  I learned about how to ‘smeyes.’  I figured out that if I placed my tongue directly behind my top front teeth that my jaw would sit in a perfect position.  That all helped a lot, but still my mouth was obnoxiously tight looking.  I hated it.  I hated it mostly because I knew I’d developed a tense and tight mouth; not because it was my natural face but because of how I’d reacted to my life in ways that I wanted to stop doing.  I wanted to fix it, I wanted to look how I felt now and not how I’d been feeling before. 

And so, I sought the help of a cosmetic injector.  “Can Botox help with this?”  I asked her.  And indeed, it could.  By placing a small amount of Botox strategically around my mouth, the muscles that had grown tense with time and grief would relax.   And I would retrain them on my daily selfie walks until eventually, my natural smile would unfold.  The change in me was quite drastic.  I hadn’t realized it, but the mouth tension I’d developed had literally folded some of my lips inward - when they relaxed again, my mouth occupied more of my face.   My face took on ease and balance that I had never seen on myself before.  Another thing happened, too: people stopped asking me if I was mad about something every time I didn’t have a smile on my face.  

From there, I got to work on project selfie.   All summer long I took these walks and took selfie after selfie, like a self-conscious thirteen year old might.  But for me, this exercise was less about insecurity and more about learning to see myself as a person in the world after a lifetime of living in my mind, in my anxiety and my grief.  I would take these selfies and then study them later, seeing myself as if for the first time. I bought sundresses and admired the way my collarbones and shoulders looked.  I discovered that bright lipstick looks really great on me. And I smiled.  Genuine, big smiles that surprised even me.   

By the time I created my dating app profiles, I had a selection of good photos all showing me authentically.   I had taken the time to get to know and appreciate myself, to know how to present myself.   I had learned my angles and my best features and I learned that with a little help from a magic potion, I could turn back time not to look younger, but to undo some of the ways I’d reacted to a harsh life.  I got to have a do-over with my smile.  And now, I was ready to introduce myself to other people and to let them see me in a way that few ever had.  Hello, this is me.  Chin on the ledge.  I can smile.