Day 5: Write a story about your first memory of make up.
My first memory of makeup is its smell, the way the soft delicate powder carries some memory of summer flowers and the way it shimmered under the lights of my mom’s bathroom when I would open the tiny compacts of rouge and eye shadow when she wasn’t at home to stop me. I never put any on by myself—I knew that was forbidden— but snapping open the tiny black Lancôme clamshells and smelling them was magic, bringing her presence to me in the room even if she was at work or away at a conference hundreds of miles away.
My feelings toward make-up are oddly ambiguous; I will not fit in in graduate school because, as one of the other (female) graduate students told me candidly in a 19th Century Literature seminar: You wear way too much makeup. Yet, instead of seeing the colored powders and liquid foundations and inky-black eyeliner and mascara as trappings of masks, they align more closely with how I understand performance and art: expressive, perhaps in some way accentuating the original.
Maybe this is because the first time my mom put makeup on me was for a performance when I’d be on a stage when I was five or six years old. Rouge on my cheeks, black eyeliner that extended beyond my eyes with little fishtail shapes to make my eyes “pop” under the stage lights, and a swipe or two of mascara. Like the leotard or dress, the makeup was just another part of the uniform that went along with the gymnastics, the dance or the play.
In high school, my stepfather will throw my makeup into the toilet when he finds out I’d been wearing it as a way to ruin it. I am especially pissed when he does this with a large brush for applying rouge that my stepmom bought for me when I turned sixteen, because I knew it was a nice one, and I will want to sing to him (now, looking back): This is why we can’t have nice things.
During quarantine, I am also called out like I was in graduate school. I do not join in the conversation with my female co-workers about how liberating it was to give up makeup now that we all work from home. Instead, I mail-ordered mine, and the routine of putting on work clothes, high heels and the standard set of foundation, rouge, eyeliner, shadow and mascara is a daily ritual that keeps me from completely losing myself in this home-bound version of despair.
At one point, I wish my days would be premised on the shades of eye shadow I apply: colors named provocatively like purr, lace, catcall, passion, saucy, and midnight. The entire collection is called “Maneater” and if there were such things as bars now that I am nearly 40, I would tell the world to watch out—this performance has been rehearsed many, many times.
Day 7: Be still for five minutes and breathe the words: “I love and accept myself.”
I made a cup of tea in my favorite feather mug, set the timer on my phone for five minutes, and sat on the floor in my office to listen to the silence and my breath articulate the words: I love and accept myself. Almost immediately, the cats joined me (because I was on the floor) and formed a purring cocoon of love around me. After five minutes of stillness, this poem surfaced:
Quiet is like a feather, soft
Barely enough to touch,
Delicate, woven into the light
--that is love and acceptance--
But feathers, too, have strength
They are masters of flight
that hold the bodies of birds high above
stronger than thermals and downdrafts
Love and acceptance are quiet warriors
Like feathers are to flight.
Day 9: Move your body, feel the feelings that arise, write about them.
I want to believe there are countless golden threads that connect the various points of my body like a mesh, that glimmer with light powered by joy. They carry the music of movement that happens during the countless strides, steps, revolutions, those long or short lines of the body covering space— long like riding my bike on those lingering summer afternoons or short like the clipped laps in the pool. These are the lines of body-poetry.
It is the line “you don’t look like an athlete” I hear again and again and again growing up because I am short and I refuse to be delicate. I dance like I eat: a lot and often and full of passion because I can and I want to, not caring how much space I take up.
It is the line “you are better than I thought you would be” that came from coaches who stared down at me when I was the only 8-year old to wear the red-white-and-blue belt at the gymnastics gym because of the way I could make the vault event look like flying. I am fourteen when I win a national title with a competitive cheerleading team for high school students (an administrative error got me on the team.) I’m sixteen the year I win State in the Pole Vault and Power Lifting.
And then the pendulum swings and I am very old (in athlete-years), 27, when I win my first marathon because I missed those golden threads, and I was ready to have them sing just for me. (I didn't mean to win. I just wanted to run the race and finish. I wanted to do something just for me.) The long runs created the long bike rides, which fed into the swim practices, brick workouts, triathlon races, ultra-endurance cycling, classic cycling, a waterfall of verbs washing over my body with starting lines and podiums and for ten years I swear to God I'm drowning.
Then there is modern dance I take when I turn 38 and the golden threads said “enough with your metaphors, woman. Just dance!” And I danced like no one was watching and like I used to eat, a lot and often and full of passion. I encouraged myself to take up space even though I was surrounded by college students at least fifteen years younger than I was.
And then quarantine happened and I was all alone. I remember how to breathe. A jog with the dog around the park. Push-ups because I want to. And, slowly, day by day, that golden mass of threads that traces the complicated journey of this body, which despite all the odds, has accumulated strength began to shine again.
There is so much joy in all that moving.