On Looking At My Face In The Mirror, A Year Into A Pandemic

After a year of isolation, I am irritated with my own company.

There’s not really a good way to write about this pandemic. There is no one essay that could capture the whole experience. And everyone has their own essays they could write. I cannot really say anything sweeping or universal about this year, but here is a slice of how I’ve been feeling. 

I want to look at other peoples’ face again. I have spent way too much time looking at my own.

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 New Beauty Standards 

I had to take a photo of myself to get my passport renewed. My partner took twenty photos, too many to stand. I cried. I thought, photos of me look like photos of a woman who has been living in a well. 

My face looks droopy to me. I look old, tired, and sad. I hear these words on repeat when I look at myself. 

Apparently, teenagers on Tik Tok are drawing dark circles under their eyes with make-up. It is a new “beauty trend” for which I need to do no work. The circles under my eyes have taken over my whole face. Do we make trauma and tragedy into beauty? Like how looking feverish and pale was trendy when everyone was dying of tuberculosis? If Keats died of tuberculosis, it must be sexy. 

Or are we just getting pranked by the teens? 

All I know is that last year I was 29. I was the most hot, fun, young, and wise I had ever been. 

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On a podcast recently, a doctor said that relationships are mild anti-depressants. Instead of seeing my friends, I have started running and listening to podcasts (podcast people are your close personal friends, right?) For that forty minutes of running and the hour that follows, I feel good. Then I feel vague again. 

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This obsession with my face is about identity. When I look at myself in the mirror and I don’t recognize myself it’s because I am different person than I was a year ago. And that is painful. 

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Movies About Identity Crises

The Thing (why is it not human? Could I become it?)

Ex Machina (am I alive? am I a woman, as defined by a man?)

Blackfish (is a whale a person, if a person is defined by soul rather than body?)

An American Werewolf In London (am I an inherently bad person?)

Kissing Jessica Stein (why am I not more gay, dammit?) 

Black Swan (do I want to have sex with her, or do I want to be her?)

I Heart Huckabees (is everything around me bullshit, including myself?)

It’s Complicated (why am I not happy with my already beautiful kitchen?) 

I wonder what sort of movies will be made about this time. How will art be influenced by this year of loneliness, grief, loss, and living with ourselves? What sort of body horror about unstable identity or comedy about isolation? What will art look like when it’s responding to a year we were failed by the government? A year of cognitive dissonance when so many people, egged on by a tyrannical president, just pretended the pandemic wasn’t happening. A year when all the lies about America they told us in school became more clear than ever.

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Blog Thoughts 

I took a long hiatus from my little blog. The pandemic sucked a lot of writing energy out of me, and what little I had I tried to preserve for the stories and “novel project” I have in the works. (Unclear whether said project will result in an actual novel. Stay tuned.) 

I don’t know what I will do with this blog in the future. I am thinking of sticking to these small, pop-culture thoughts—ideas I want to share but aren’t quite robust enough for an entire essay. 

Also, stay tuned for another short story of mine that will be published soon! I’m very excited to share it.