Aesthetica

by Allie Rowbottom

But really, I was thinking of what more I could make for myself, what more I could make for my mother, now that I was backed by a number that would continue to grow if I worked at it, leveraged my number for a bigger, better number. Leverage was how empires were built, the walls of a well-made house high and thick and every bill paid on time, everyone inside healthy and safe.

At the time, it sort of outraged me, how people were Photo-shopping their content in secret. So even as I learned to alter my images, I told myself I’d use my power carefully.

For women, so often robbed of agency, was there some freedom in controlling how the world saw our bodies, consumed our bodies?

Counting is an instinct I can’t silence. Counting is like hunger itself. I used to think it would protect me. As if in reducing the essence of something—a story, a meal, a body—to a number, I’d know its truest value.

I read recently that long-term benzo use, opioid abuse, leads to early dementia, perpetual forgetting. I read that Botox weakens the forehead; when it wears off, you look older than ever. I read that a frozen face has been proven to a make a woman happier than an expressive one; she looks in the mirror, sees less trouble, and becomes it.

I just want to look like myself, my true self, stripped of time and the violence of past mistakes.

Other people rarely understood how she could be so many things, all at once. It was like they wanted her reduced, simplified.

I wanted the nurse to talk to me gently, as she would a child. It’s a feeling I still have sometimes, around women.

I’m old enough to know that this is how true transformation works, in increments so small you don’t notice until one day you wake up and realize you’ve changed.

The late nineties-era skin and bones I was born into came back into fashion this decade, lucky for no one. But it’ll change again soon, of that I’m certain.

Something about how salesmen never stop speaking long enough to listen. They already know what the customer will say next, what they’ll want. They know to anticipate the next vibe shift, next nostalgic cycle.

I’m always certain that this moment, this fashion, this platform, is the final version, that culture has finally reached its ...

But I was listening when I should have been talking, acting, fighting. I’ve been this way since girlhood.

I listened to the culture’s silent songs about who was desired and why and I believed them. I believed that Instagram, the filtered aesthetic it popularized—Instagram face, we called it—was true.

When after some years, it shifted—girls, women, people, going filterless, makeupless, foregoing injectables, drugs, social media itself—I thought the world had changed, that from then on everything would be different. Culture seemed to think so, too. Then the ideal changed once more, as it was always going to.

We real people are supposed to be beyond aesthetics again. Again, morality is what we’re supposed to have arrived at, an obvious, absolute morality we can all agree is right and good, pure and natural.

The collective over the individual, the collective over the #cancelleds, the Karens, the ableds, the incels, the long-haul Purells. The collective agreement that only certain stories deserve telling, while others should stay untold, punished for the privilege they once had.

When she declared she wanted to be a lawyer, to fight for the rights of the wrongly accused, people said it was impossible. But impossible is what we loved her for, followed and paid her for. It was only when she wanted to be smart, useful, that we wondered if she could.

I suspect I’ll recover, return, and sometimes the wanting will, too: to be beautiful, to be seen, to be loved and never left. Desire like that isn’t a failure, or a girlhood flight of fancy. It’s a fact of every life.

I was 100,000 followers. I was 30,000 hearts, two hundred and eighty-eight DMs.

After that, Jake sent Ella and me to Shonda for Sculptra butt injections because “slim thick” bodies were the newest ideal I didn’t quite match up to.

I chose scalpels, needles, lasers to inflict the pain I deserved, the transformation, the healing. Sometimes they worked. Mostly, they didn’t.

I suppose, heroes and heroines are supposed to have grown up, never guessing they were special until adventure presented itself and they denied, then finally accepted, the call. Or maybe they always knew they were special, but hid themselves among the plebes anyway, aware of bad prophecies, jealous stepmothers, violent husbands, the danger in being seen.

Every mirror is an illusion. The only one I want is the one my mother offered, a vision of myself through her eyes.

It’s up to me to look upon myself the way I imagine she would: with love. Maybe that’s the wisest approach to the life left for me to move through, age into. It’s a privilege, to age, I see that now.

I knew it was a problem, but still visited the med spa every three months like I was going to church. And every time I made the drive, I felt excited, like this treatment would be the treatment that changed everything. After, I was often so depressed I cried on the way home.