I cut my hair a few weeks back in preparation for job interviews, and made the mistake of going to one of those discount hair cutting places where it's hit or miss whether you'll walk out butchered or not. I had to take scissors to my own head the next day, and this forced me to look in the mirror. And so I decided my eyebrows could use some plucking. I was forced to look at my face. My 42 year-old, aging face that surprises me because it loooks older than I remember it last looking. The face that bulges outward and sags downward on the one side, sliding all my features into what one of my high school teachers called a "permanent left turn."
My face with the underlying anomaly that no doctor has yet been able to definitively pin a diagnosis on, that colors my skin reddish, or greenish, or purlish, or bluish (often dependent on the weather) that engorges with emotion, blood pressure, exertion, and exhaustion. The face I have identified with all my life, that like Georgianna in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," I've felt was a valid, integral part of me I couldn't think of living without. The birthmark a tangle of vessels so deep they could not be taken without taking a good deal of function. The face I've liked because it set me apart, kept me all my life from looking like everyone else and only ordinary.
This face, now that I'm looking at it in my middle age, having lived with it through youth, when differences mattered and kids either were indifferent or cruel, through adolescence, when I wondered if my misshapen mouth would ever be kissed. Through college, when my face became an obsession, my self-portraits taking me on an internal journey of the meaning of art in my life, and images of my bared, lopsided face won its own strange approval. As Kathe Kollwitz once said, "Le beau c'est le laid." (The beautiful is the ugly.)
This face now, for some reason, has come to plague me again as never before. Looking in the mirror this morning was not about art, or love, or compassion or courage. It was about identity. Who am I now, and what do I see? I left my last job to write. When I write, when my identity is being a writer, I can exist invisible, face unseen and soul carried by the words. But now I am in the workforce again. In a position with exposure to people I don't know. How much explaining will I need to do? How much proving of ability will I need to demonstrate before my "do" value compensates for my lack of good looks?
I start again, the way I have had to start anything again, given all the starts I've faced in my life. Why does this one bother me more? Why does my face, the one I have lived with and by all these years, peer back at me from the mirror as something I've never seen before, a version that crept up on me when I wasn't looking? A truer version, or a more clever, determined imposter? Who can no longer hide behind the invisibility and anonymity of her words.
Original source: http://psiemm.wordpress.com/?p=24
