She was a frozen clock—a face I would have liked to know, but stripped of the marks of time, there was nothing left on it worth knowing. So, when her office emailed to confirm my next filler appointment, I pushed it a week. That week became two, then three, then six months, then more. I also stopped the GLP-1 medications, thinking that I wanted to let my face and body settle into itself. I wanted to learn to see myself as actually and plainly myself. What would follow were the five stages of grief.
Stage 1: Denial
I didn’t recognize myself, or maybe I just didn’t like what I saw. I was so accustomed to the smoothed, filled, slenderized version of myself that the real one looked like a stranger. I avoided staring in the mirror at all costs. And instead I filled the hours, restlessly, almost accidentally, with other things. I picked up books I had been meaning to read for years. I rejoined the gym and ran determinedly towards a 5K twice a week. I focused my attention on applying—impulsively and half-terrifingly—to an MFA program in creative writing. I told myself I was just staying busy but in actuality I didn’t yet understand I was building something.
Stage 2: Anger
I became angry at myself, for the years lost in that cycle of self-obsession. At the things I could not control. At the particular cruelty of perimenopause arriving precisely as I had decided to make peace with myself, at the hair thinning, the skin shifting, the body renegotiating every term that we had agreed on. At the money I spent trying to outrun a process that was simply and biologically happening whether I liked it or not. I was angry in the way you are angry when you finally see a con for what it was, and realize you were a willing participant.
Stage 3: Bargaining
Late in the evenings, I would stalk my dermatologist’s website, scouring for promotions that might make that one appointment worthwhile. I just needed half a vial of Botox for my elevens, one syringe of filler for my smile lines. No one would know or notice but me, I told myself. I had entire conversations with myself about this in my bed, my car, at work. What saved me, in part, was that I had somewhere else to be. A workshop that happened every Tuesday and a craft seminar every Thursday, where classmates would want to talk about the essay I had written, and not what I looked like writing it. (By now I had been accepted into that MFA program.) I started building friendships around ideas rather than aesthetics, with people who knew me as a writer, a thinker, a woman with something to say.
