What Your Face Is For

That's just what you look like.

“Delete this picture right now!”

“No way in hell! It’s cute!”

“It’s horrific!”

Jo damn-near leaps over the sofa to get to my phone, her arms flailing. The desperation in her face over the seventh-grade picture is almost sad, if it wasn’t so funny.

If you ask me, she never had a ‘bad phase’. But, let’s be real here, everyone knows they’ve had. Others just can’t see it the way you do.

My “bad” phase stretched from middle school to mid-high school, at the least. Awkward teeth, first bare and then tightened by braces, bulky glasses that were always a smudge too dirty and an overall uncomfortable posture.

My siblings laugh every time they see a picture of me from that time. “You know what you looked like?” Dalia sputters between guffaws. “That one emoji! The one with the overbite and the glasses!” I couldn’t even argue with her. That’s exactly what I looked like. The worst part might be that everybody around me was cool, so the contrast only highlighted my uncoolness.

Caleb and Dalia were the kind of kids who walked down the halls at school flanked by other cool teens, had effortlessly cool Instagram profiles, made plans every weekend and went to parties and hang-outs. Sure, Dalia was a victim to the 2016 brows and the chokers and the Adidas Superstars, and I’m pretty sure Caleb dreamed of working at Buzzfeed at some point, but none of this was uncool at the time. Everybody else did it, too.

I, on the other hand, wore jeggings and orthopedic boots people laughed at me for in public. The glasses didn’t help. The braces didn’t help. The incredibly uncomfortable self-awareness you walk around with as a teenager didn’t help, either.

The desperation to look better had a tendency to claw at me like a rabid animal, leaving its marks in the dreams I had for myself. I wanted contacts, counted the days until I got my braces off, begged my Mom to let me straighten my hair, and tried to eat a little less.

To be honest, I think I’ve never regarded myself as someone who has an appearance, in all the simplicity of this concept. I was more like a project, the before in those TLC makeover shows like Plain Jane and Snog Marry Avoid. I was ugly, wildly unattractive and chronically uncool, but at least I was aware of it.

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“There’s a weird kind of entitlement there,” I tell Esme on a call. Rain is clinging to the windows and her humming warms the room like a radiator. “If you think about it. I would never be that unashamed about being so critical of someone else’s appearance, but it’s different when it’s about me.”

“That’s because you can do something about it,” says Esme. “You can justify it for yourself because you’re supposed to be the one to take action. Criticising someone else’s crooked teeth and smile lines would be bullying, but criticising your own feels like a first step of some process you should be in. It’s actionable. That’s a significant difference.”

I think about that for a second. When I was that uncool and ugly, each of my criticisms toward myself came paired with an alternative; the ‘before’ I felt I was stuck in always had an ‘after’ on its periphery—the person I’d be when I was better, prettier, skinnier, cooler.

“Besides,” she adds, more quietly, as if mulling over the words herself first, “Were you really that ugly? Or was that just what you looked like?”

Her words found me again months later. I’d posted a picture with Nic from our visit to a vintage photobooth. We were embracing, smiling wide, our eyes closed in the black-and-white image on my Instagram feed.

The tip of my nose was nearly brushing the screen as I inspected the image. Or, well, as I inspected myself: the angle of my eyes, the shade of my eyebrows, the way my lips didn’t curve up but rather seemed to pull back when I smiled, which didn’t look that great. I considered the lines by my mouth, that hinted at the fullness of my cheeks, and the way my hair looked like one big blob.

“That smile is horrific,” I muttered.

Then, like a chime in the back of my head, a voice said, “That’s just what you look like.”

It was a punch to my gut.

I reared my head back, dropped the phone on the table as if I’d been burned. On the screen, the image of Nic and me innocently faced up to the ceiling, trapped in the moment.

It was just that: a picture of me and my best friend, happy and grinning. I remembered the way we’d slipped off our scarves and coats and bags to fit into the small booth, the long line of people behind us shifting on their feet. We’d picked out this booth because I’d seen it online, made a reservation at an Indonesian restaurant by a skating rink for after. We shared dinner and exchanged advice, laughed and fantasised about the future.

The picture was supposed to be a representation of that night, a moment in time to show our children in ten years. “Look, it’s your auntie and your mom when they were in their twenties!”

Are moments in time supposed to be that perfect? Would I want my future daughter to criticise my smile lines, or her own, or would I want her to feel happy and glad seeing her face in mine? Our matching downturned smiles, our same eyes?

She’ll understand that our looks don’t inherently come with a status or score. That’s just what we look like. This is how we move through life. This is how we smile when we’re at our happiest.

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