It was 2018 when I was twenty-eight, lying in a darkened hotel room, paying Dr. Botox in Backstreet to get rid of Wrinkles on the forehead. Two weeks later, the crappy job started and my roommate would look at me with concern.
“Are you okay?” they asked.
“Yes, why?” I replied.
“Are you so… sad?”
I looked at my face in the mirror, my right eyelid drooped slightly, and my forehead looked weird As weird as slicing cheese, I did what only
year old Upper East Side women should do, I screwed up my face. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be told I look “a bit hunky,” “out of shape,” “very, very shiny?”
But I’m not the same as I used to be It felt ugly that way, even though my face looked completely different. That’s because something like a Botox, or any intervention against ugliness, aging, or weight gain—whatever you want to call it—is considered more morally laudable than accepting your body as it is.
For most of my life, I have never been able to identify what it was like to feel ugly. But I’ve also noticed that I get congratulated when I’m doing something to change my appearance to a more acceptable standard of beauty. Whether it was being put on a strict diet by my doctor when I was fourteen, being complimented by a group of women at Weight Watchers when I lost a pound a week, or what a friend’s mom said to me at my wedding She’s so happy that I’m starting to be kind to my skin. The last time she saw me, she said, I “looked uncomfortable”.
Attempts to change one’s appearance are often wrongly placed on a moral scale. My sense of ugliness is often most vivid when I do things to my body that I’ve been told are “bad” when I may not understand much about the systems that police unruly bodies work on. Likes smoking, eating fast food, drinking heavily, and not exercising. So I made weird choices in the name of this false goodness: wild diets, impossible fitness programs, binge eating, and backstreet Botox.
