In my twenties, I had some notion that I might turn my sophomore yearbook into an art project. I started making notes in the margins, collaging in stories, adding in drawings. My high school didn’t hand out yearbooks until the next school year, so we didn’t have the yearbook signing STAY COOL THIS SUMMER. OMG DO YOU BELIEVE HOW BAD NINTH GRADE SUX purple sparkle pen free-for-all that we’d endured in public school, so mine was still almost a virgin copy (pun halfway intended) when I started messing with it. I say “allmost” because upon immediate receipt of my yearbook I doodled all the way over my picture, because when I was sixteen, I thought the picture was so horrifying, so grotesque, so obliterating that I could not imagine the picture making me feel anything more than a profound desire to disappear entirely.
This sounds like hyperbole, but I believe somewhere in your brain you might be able to remember what it was to be a teenager, and in particular, what was to be a periodically self-loathing teenager. Being a teenager is living in a perpetual state of hyperbole. I blame hormones and the various scrapes and bruises that come with blind navigation of the continually changing landscape of transition. And as much as I’ve written about it over the years, I think even I’d sort of forgotten what it was like.
The thing, though, about being a woman in middle age is that sometimes your body does this weird, deconstructed reconfigured pantomime of puberty. Hormones are out of contro again. And even with modern medical interventions and all the wacky, largely ineffective (but sometimes fun) bullshit people recommend as an alternative or complement to modern medical interventions, you can still find yourself surfing some Big Godzilla-sized feelings wildly out of proportion with the petty whatever provoked said feelings, says the woman who spent an hour last night sobbing at how cute my cat’s front left paw is.
Maybe this helps us get back in touch with our youthful selves. Helpful if we’re teaching teenagers, raising teenagers, or just trying to get our morose, slack-ass inner children to get the fuck over it after almost four decades of being absolute nightmare bitch queen roommates. After all, I still look at pictures, or mirrored surfaces, or the security camera at the self-checkout and think I do not like that person and I certainly can’t recognize her and why not just drift out of the frame, into the mist, under a scrawl of “ironic” doodling.
I felt a lot of different emotions a couple nights ago when my mother uncovered this picture while cleaning out the attic eaves of her hose. It had been, I thought, deliberately lost, personally remembered as “The Worst Picture of Me Ever Take.” I was surprised Mom even had it.. I don’t even remember the school sending proofs home. I’m sure I would have destroyed them if I’d known.
The thirty-five years or so that have come since this photo have given the lie to the idea that this picture was some cataclysmic, earth and soul shattering event. It’s not a great picture, but it’s also, like, not even close to the worst. Was the haircut the most flattering? Maybe not. Could I in any way fill out the top of the super cool dress from The Limited that I borrowed from my mother for picture day? Not for another year or so. Did I look a teensy bit like chubby Matt Damon at a time when culture suggested that teenaged girls were supposed to look like Winona Ryder or Ione Skye or even, like, Brenda from 90210? Yes. Did this end up ruining my life? No.
It is always a shock seeing yourself when your self-presentation does not match how you feel inside. And I’ll tell you sometime. Age, therapy, exercise, cool clothes, fancy make-up, a good dermatologist and a better hairdresser do not change that. There are always going to be times when I look at myself in pictures, or mirrored surfaces, or the security camera at the self-checkout and think I do not like that person and I certainly can’t recognize her and why not just drift out of the frame, into the mist, under a scrawl of “ironic” doodling.
I get that I’m supposed to come at you from the vantage of whole-ass middle aged adulthood and tell you about my triumph of self-esteem, how I learned to LOVE MYSELF, how you too can be fully confident in your own intrinsic hotness. And I’m telling you that’s a big ask and its own kind of cruelty.. Life is hard. Sometimes the best you’ve got is “I guess this will have to do.” Because it will and it is.
As it turns out, I couldn’t make this picture of myself disappear. I’m not going to read too much into that. But, if you’re wondering, I’m not sorry we’re both still still around.
