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On Beauty, Regret and the Many Virtues of Lipstick

High School Revisited

I'm a horrible person. My mother recently asked me to go to my brother's band concert (she didn't know how to work the camera, she said, and I'd go, wouldn't I?), and rather than supporting my brother and helping my mom, all I could think about was how badly I didn't want to go because I didn't want to see anyone from my high school. For one thing, I would have to leave in the next two minutes, and I didn't have any makeup on. Plus, I'd sort of schlumped my hair into a highly unglamorous ponytail.

But I went anyway, grumpily stepping into the sports arena where I'd once played basketball. Everything about the semi-rural Oklahoma school was the same as when I graduated. There were only a few of the same people, but most everyone had been replaced by another of the same type: the Carhartt jackets, the diminutive moms in Christmas sweaters, the guy with residual 80s metal-band hair.

My job for the evening was to take pictures of my brother with the rest of the band court. After fulfilling my sisterly responsibilities, I walked out into the cold air, through the parking lot where I used to run laps, and wished desperately, sickly, that I had been happier in high school — that I had been beautiful.

I wouldn't even think so much about being beautiful now, though Lord knows I fight that fight every day, if I could just have some memory of being a beautiful teenage girl for any length of time at all.

But I wasn't. And I'm not trying to elicit sympathy; my unbeauty had as much to do with presentation as with genetics. I guess you could say I was sort of post-grunge in the sense that I wore lots of loose-fitting clothes, almost always something that had been given to me. No makeup. And I don't even want to talk about my hair except to say that mousse and I were not very well acquainted. Somewhere under the frizz there might have been a cute girl, but she certainly didn't think so, and she was no teen beauty queen.

There's a guy in this story, of course. In eighth grade, I heard a ninth-grade boy say something about me, something cruel. And I decided in that moment that even if I had once been a bright, smart, funny kid, I had failed to make the transition to pretty young lady. Somehow that one sentence stayed with me, and I think part of me gave up on becoming a beautiful woman. Stupid guy. And stupid me.

Chasing Beauty

Beauty is all about confidence, they say. Maybe with a little lipstick and bravado, I'll yet achieve some sort of beauty. Or maybe I'll just forget it and say I'm going for that whole "unassuming" beauty thing. Either way, the task at hand is to resist the temptation to spend half of my next paycheck on clothes. The taxes and fees for the car I bought recently totaled approximately $7 million, meaning that I can't afford to assuage my insecurity with a trip to Express.

And so hotness may or may not be nigh, and the fact of the matter is that my teenage years are simply gone. The teen years are for shouting, "I'm starting to figure myself out, and I'm awesome." I whispered something more like, "Please, please, don't look at me." And no matter how much confidence I develop or how much lipstick I wear, I can't get those years back — which wouldn't be so bad, except that I feel like a very important window is closing.

Regret is the worst. When I most deeply regret the way I was at any given time in my life, I find myself nailing my hands to a self-imposed cross, stretched out and self loathing. And that's wrong for at least 20 different reasons: because every day is valuable, even the hard ones; because honest struggle is redemptive and good and necessary — and beautiful; because my life is not worthless just because I didn't have some kind of debutante experience at a prescribed time. Most of all, submitting to regret means telling God that something is useless, that my days as a nerd are wholly unredeemable.

Getting Over Regret

Choosing not to be consumed by regret is to look at those high school pictures of me and choose to see a girl who was lonely and hurt, but not really alone. She was struggling, but God was there, somewhere, loving her. And she was beautiful.

It's a choice, I guess: I'm going to have to choose not to hate yesterday, not to hate myself. I can't get my prom back, but I'll fight tooth and nail for my sanity.

The morning after the band concert, hung over on mild depression, I bought a fashion magazine, kind of a balm for my wounded feminine soul. One article caught my eye, a subtle denunciation of the idea that there is a "perfect age" for women, a period of years shortly after high school in which a woman is most beautiful and after which she is stale birthday cake. The inset read, "Do any of us ever feel what we are supposed to feel at the time we are supposed to feel it?" Indeed.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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Do you ever struggle with regret? How do you overcome it?

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A decidedly helpful magazine in total, I would say — I gleaned a few tips on lipstick shades and updos and even tore out a picture to show my hair stylist. I guess it just goes to show that God tends to bring little, unexpected redemptions in highly uneventful day-to-day occurrences. Today is an infinitely usable day — as is yesterday.