When I go get my haircut, I always turn in the chair and grab the arms of my stylist and say, “Please. Please do not give me a haircut that requires any sort of effort. I will not do whatever it is I’m supposed to do and it will look like shit.”
The stylist, the poor stylist, will run her fingers through my thick, shiny hair that has been untouched by dye or heat and say, “But all it takes is some styling mousse.”
I will just shake my head sadly, as if it’s not only unlikely, but impossible.
My personal care routine has always been a bit feral. I wash my hair and comb it and that’s it. I do not wear make-up. I have a facial moisturizer that I use when I remember it, which is about once every two weeks. The most effort I put into personal care is getting my eyebrows waxed every 6-8 weeks, just long enough for the women at the nail salon to forget they know me.
I recently paid a guy to redo my website and decided that since I’m in my Querying Author era, I should probably have a more professional picture than a twenty-year-old snapshot of me with a mustache. Alex insisted that I use the headshot booth at the local university. I pictured myself mean-mugging the camera before a black background. I barked at him, “I want to look natural and inviting, not like the CEO of a dialysis company!” Instead, I found a photographer who didn’t want to charge me $400 for fifteen minutes of pictures and we set a date.
Then the nerves set in.
Headshots! That meant hair and make-up and clothing.
I texted every friend I know who knows anything about make-up to get advice about what to buy. I could have gone to Ulta and had them do my make-up, but the few times I’ve had professional make-up artists work on my face, they always cover up my freckles WHICH ARE THE BEST PART OF MY FACE. I don’t want my readers to think that I look like a Victorian ghost because some Gen-Z girl at Sephora thinks freckles are blemishes.
I got good advice that overwhelmed me very quickly and decided to just try to do me**, which meant shiny lip gloss and mascara so I didn’t look like a lashless, lipless potato. I went up to Walgreens and found brown mascara that wouldn’t look like I’d glued spiders to my eyelids.
The lip gloss. Well, the lip gloss was a problem. I’d discovered from my extensive research that your lip gloss is not supposed to be the same color as your lips.
Standing in the make-up section at Target, I asked the obvious question: What color are my lips?
It got philosophical real quick. Is that something people actually know? Why don’t I know that? Should I?
Unfortunately, Target did not have mirrors for me to examine the hue of my mouth. The other trendy, beautifully coiffed women shopping for make-up gave me a wide berth as I started at a too-close-up picture of my lips on my phone, holding up shiny lip glosses to compare.
I came home with a color that was probably too pink and ran upstairs to try it. I swiped the wand across my lips, tucked them in to get the sticky gloss evenly distributed like women have done since time immemorial, and smiled in the mirror to a mouthful of white teeth smeared with pink gloss.
In a panic, I tried to rub the offending color off my teeth with my finger but, the unusually sticky lip gloss got everywhere and on everything. I sat on the floor of my bathroom and leaned back against the cabinets, hands, mouth, and teeth covered in the evidence of my ineptitude. I sent Alex out to buy shiny lip-gloss that was clear and decided that was going to be it.
The night before I remembered a mystical product called “toner” that might help with redness and “evening my skin tone out”. It was too late to go out so we looked up a DIY toner and I swiped peppermint and green tea on my face instead.
On the day of, I woke up early and dug my ancient bottle of mousse out of the cabinet to help the curl in my hair coalesce.
“I need you to be my hair and make-up guy,” I told Alex.
Always an encourager, Alex said, “Of course. What do you need me to do?”
I handed him a few bobby pins and my clear lip gloss. “Keep these in your pocket and look out for my bra strap.”
In a nearby park, I, smelling of peppermint tea, told Marques about my book while he futzed around with the settings on his camera. Once the shoot got started, it was like I realized that I had hands for the first time and had no idea what to do with them. I stood with my arms at my side, my fingers outstretched, and Marques took pity on me. He helped me figure out what to do with my hands, but there were moments when I went rogue. Enjoy: The expectant mother. Hyper-mobile sassy hands. Plumbing company headshot.
The whole thing took about a half-hour. I went home, took off my bra, and let the mascara come off my eyelashes naturally over the course of a few days.
There’s no doubt about it: this quest to publish a book (about forty times I went outside my comfort zone) is annoyingly pushing me outside my comfort zone. I’ve bumped into so many things where I’ve thought, What are you doing, you little imposter? You think you can be a writer? You have no idea what you’re doing. None.
And, while it’s a little mean, that internal voice isn’t wrong but it’s also not the full story. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I can learn. I can try and make mistakes and try again. I would have thought that these opportunities for growth through failure would get less and less as I got older, but they actually seem to be increasing. That’s aging, I guess.
I’m going to keep pressing forward, even if I sometimes feel like an imposter with lop-sided hair and lip gloss on her teeth and hands that have a mind of their own.
(My ‘Getting Published‘ series is a peek behind the scenes of what writers have to do to get published (well, I’m not published yet. Hopefully, I will get published). You can follow along by subscribing to my blog!)
Leave a Reply