The price of being alive

On botox, self love and - shit I think my prefrontal cortex just developed

Two months before I turned twenty-five, a greek waiter mistook me for being older so on my return to London I did a completely normal and rational thing - I booked a free botox consultation at a famous clinic.

I had four deep set lines that bothered me. I looked at them often in my phone camera, and every time a photo was taken I’d notice them there. Deep and ingrained. Makeup would get stuck in there and make them look dark and menacing. Menacing forehead lines, that’s what I had.

The clinic based in Chelsea was beautiful, neutrally decorated and felt like a set of a TikTok where they said things like slick back and clean girl. Dried pampas in every corner and huge Vogue coffee table books were placed around the room in carefully laid out perfection. I tried to unstick my bum that had stuck to the leather seats and I was met with daggers from Chelsea’s chiselled wives.

I had to fill in a form all about my emotional ties to my forehead lines. Which, whilst that is objectively a wildly insane sentence to write it was strangely provoking. The questions read like one’s I had seen in therapy years prior,

‘Does your appearance stop you leaving the house?

Does your appearance make you avoid reflective surfaces?

Do you think you would be happier without your imperfections?’

I thought about what might happen if I had answered yes to any of these questions, would a therapist come out of the velvet curtain and tell me I was actually worthy of life even if I had menacing forehead lines? The truth was unfortunately an upsell of their services, a £99 skin boosting package to undo the stresses of city living. I was no stranger to the stresses of living, after going through a life altering breakup, a life altering medical diagnosis, and general london rental breakdowns - I was not overly surprised that it had appeared on my face. I had been stressed. A part of me just wanted to scrub it all away, restore a version of myself years ago that hadn’t been through any of these things. They were exposing me as an unhappy stressed person. A very important part of being a young woman is to pretend you are the opposite. To be the personification of Gone girl’s ‘cool girl’ who drinks beer and eats pizza whilst remaining a size zero with glass skin.

“Can I use the toilet?” I asked the receptionist.

“No.” She smiled softly at me.

“No?” I said it slowly back like it might have been a joke.

“We don’t have toilets here.” She smiled again, like I’d asked a completely ridiculous question, like the complimentary water she was handing out like, well water, didn’t lead to a completely normal body reaction. I looked at this perfectly manicured woman with baby pink nails and kennedy curls, and thought ‘have you ever gone for a shit in your life’?

I sat there like a nervous pig in lipstick waiting for my turn.

My injector, a doctor, called me into the room a little while later. I lay awkwardly on the bed, three huge mirrors all around me with a bright white light illuminating my face to a level no one ever needs to see. Every pore, rogue hair and yes - many menacing forehead all over lines, were all on display.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four”

“That’s the perfect age for botox.”

I wondered if she’d turn me down if I had been younger, or if I didn’t have enough lines. She ran me quickly through the process, but most notably ran me through how she’d fix my face. Told me my eyes would be a problem in the future, how they crinkled a lot as I spoke. She said I have a very expressive face.

“It’s £250 for the two areas. If you’re sure you don’t want the third.” She said, slightly pleading with me to pick the third too.

“That’s great, thank you.” I smiled at her and we stayed there for a second.

“You have a very happy face.” She said, hers unchanging.

“Do I? I thought it was all stress lines.” I said sheepishly, thinking of those late nights sitting at my computer writing, thinking about painful relationships I’d lost hours worrying over, money stresses, life crisis’s, and everything in between I’d panicked over.

“No,” She pointed at my face with her pink latex gloved finger, “These are all from being happy.”

“From being happy?” I said again, looking at them again. My eyes were folded into corners at the edges, and my mouth lines were strongly defined, I saw when I smiled my menacing forehead lines folded gently into deeper canals. I thought about myself laughing with my friends on holiday when maybe I’d forgotton to reapply a specific expensive face-only SPF, or from smiling too much with my nephew, or maybe they’re from when I’d met someone I liked and stayed awake too late being happy. All of these memories engraved into my face. These lines were actually just the cost of being alive. The price we pay to have experienced happiness. I read a quote a long time ago that said you can’t love yourself and hate the experiences that made you. Suddenly they didn’t seem so grotesque to me anymore, just human.

I think without realising, I often try to make myself as unhuman as possible - I would bleach my black hair blonde repeatedly, I would drill giant talons onto my fingers, glue expensive mink fur onto my eyelashes for months on end, I’d change the colour of my skin weekly, I’d laminate my eyebrows until they no longer felt like hair. And sometimes, on a particularly low day, I’d edit a photo of myself before posting to cover scars that littered my body. All this left me with was chemical burns from hair removal creams, torn nails and an irrepairibly damaged self esteem.

As I have crept towards 25, I’ve slowly unravelled these safety behaviours, I kept my nails manageable so I could do human tasks easily like open cans and flush toilets. My makeup natural so I don’t waste hours in front of a mirror anymore. My hair black so I won’t have to spend 4 hours every few months in that chair. I think there’s a dangerous rhetoric that could come from this, so it’s important to say that women are free to play with their appearance however they might like - dye your hair pink, wear dramatic nails, and decorate yourself how you like. But for me it was never a self-expression of individuality but more about how could I transform myself into an entirely different person. It fed into every other area of my life, from work to my relationships where I people pleased and stayed ‘cool’ with things I shouldn’t have. I would do anything but just be myself.

“Don’t worry I can get rid of all of it. It might just take us a few sessions” The doctor said, interrupting my thoughts as she walked towards me with a purple syringe of botox.

I got up and left.

-Shit, I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.