Writing My Way Back to Myself

There's a version of this that starts with credentials. Years of product testing, a following built slowly, some claim to authority that would explain why you should listen to me about anything you put on your face.

I don't have that version.

What I have is this: a few years ago, things got quiet in a way I hadn't prepared for. Work in transition. A son who had done exactly what I raised him to do and moved three thousand miles away to do it. A life that had been organized around motion for so long that when the motion slowed, I didn't quite know what to do with myself.

And then my body joined the conversation.

It doesn't arrive gradually, the way people imply it does. You don't ease into it. You're sick for a week, and when you finally stand in front of the bathroom mirror again, something has shifted. Or you let your hair down one evening and watch it fall. That's how it goes – not a slow drift but a sudden reckoning, and always, always at the exact wrong moment. When you're already managing something else. When you have the least bandwidth to care.

I could have catalogued the damage and felt sorry about it. That felt like a long and unproductive afternoon. So instead I started paying attention. Slowly. The way I described in the first post. Sunscreen first, then everything else.

But that's not quite the whole story.

I'm a person who writes better than she talks. Not better in the sense of vocabulary – more in the sense of actually being able to say what I mean without the words getting lost somewhere between my brain and my mouth. Writing is how I figure out what I think. It's also, if I'm being honest about it, how I take care of myself when I don't know what else to do.

So when I needed something to write about, I wrote about what I was already paying attention to. The serum I'd tried three times before it finally worked. The sunscreen that didn't make me look like I'd been spackled. The slow, slightly embarrassing education of a woman who had made it deep into adulthood without ever learning what her skin type was.

Not because I became an expert. Because the writing was the point.

I still walk into Sephora and feel slightly out of my depth. Someone approaches and I start a sentence I can't finish: “I'm looking for something that—" and then I trail off, because the honest ending is “I'm not sure, I just got here.” A few kind salespeople have helped me anyway. A few YouTube videos have done more damage than good. The process of finding what actually works, for my specific face in this specific city, has been neither fast nor glamorous. It has mostly been trial and error, with the emphasis on error.

That's what this is. Not authority. Not a tutorial from someone who's always known better.

Just someone writing her way back to herself. And since you're already here, here's what that's going to look like.

I am, at this very moment, in possession of a lipstick I cannot date. Hair products from an era I'd rather not specify. A bathroom shelf that functions less as a skincare routine and more as an archaeological record of every good intention I've had and then abandoned. The process of going through it – deciding what stays, what goes, what I've apparently been keeping out of guilt – that's going to be a post. Maybe more than one.

I've also never owned a vanity table. Not once, in my entire adult life. I've done everything at the bathroom sink, or in the car, or not at all. I recently decided that this, too, is going to change. The buying of it, the putting together of it, the slow realization that I need to organize things I don't yet know how to organize – I'm going to write all of it.

Supplements. Dermatologist visits. Whatever happens when I finally stop reading about procedures and actually go get one. The honest version, including the parts that don't work out the way the before-and-after photos suggest.

None of this will be pretending to be more polished than it is. That’s the point.

If you're somewhere in the middle of figuring this out too – starting late, catching up slowly, occasionally standing in a store aisle having no idea what you're looking at – then stay. I'm not ahead of you by much. But I'm leaving notes.