Body of Work
What Botox taught me about not freezing in time.
When I said no Botox, ever, I meant it.
Never say never is profoundly unhelpful advice. It’s usually offered at the beginning of something, a period too slippery with ideals and inexperience for it to stick—even if you’re humble enough to try your best to receive it. You can’t. Those nevers you declare are the navigation system guiding your path forward. Time passes. Equally important is the first crossroads that confronts a never: now what?
Hard to know in the moment what kind of rock that never is. A foundation or a boulder blocking the path of growth or a pebble in the shoe?
I still haven’t gotten Botox. But millions of us have—a number that is rising. And rising. The number of Botox injections performed jumped 845 percent from 2000 to 2018. Post-pandemic, the number has zoomed up dramatically: treatments using Botox and fillers increased by 41% from 2020 to 2021. Learning how many people I personally knew who were getting Botox blew my mind. Most shocking to me? The practice of preventive Botox—injections targeted to people in their early 20s and priced on average $11-14 per unit—designed to preserve youthfulness before the face could ever begin slackening or the lines start to groove. The world had changed, and I didn’t realize it.
Almost every corner of my world needed reconsideration after the last few years. Maybe that’s just what it means to settle into adulthood or maybe that’s the fallout of a deeply fragmenting few years in American culture. It is exhausting to take a fresh look at everything you thought you understood or believed. Particularly when the focus of your gaze is your own changing face.
We are not machines. And so I deeply resent the distinctly American idea of infinite optimization as applied to our physical appearance. “Ever better,” an aspirational tagline for…. hyper-efficient German dishwashers—except in America it’s “ever hotter” and it’s a worldview. Honestly, how many software updates are we supposed to implement to these faces, bellies, breasts, heads of hair, butts? Worse than a new iPhone dropping every half an hour or so is the growing list of what needs tending. Last week: I catch myself absently noting that my eyelashes seem sparser in my 30s and I should maybe purchase a lash serum. How do I unsubscribe!
My inner crusader has always pushed back against the mindset of Your Hottest Life Now, although in my teens and twenties, I held the line because I idealized authenticity. Now I find equal, if not more, value in actively resisting a consumer culture that dooms us all (especially women) to an eternal treadmill of body tweaking. But this is a story of changing my mind. And I got there by thinking about changing my body.
The framework I grew up in was high-contrast: black and white, wrong and right. Smoothing my hand over the grain of this velvet memory I take strength of conviction from my childhood; run it the other way and I learned rigidity. I built my own beliefs on the bedrock of the ones my parents handed down. I admired people who held fast to their principles. I was prepared to “stand alone” for what I believed. The result is that I came into adulthood white-knuckled around my ideas.
Turns out I am very good at holding on.
The principles I cling to carved out my place in the world. It is comforting to know the corners, to be at home with a framework. Questioning deeply held beliefs—even if it isn’t me, but someone I love doing the questioning—sends waves of fear over me. If I change my mind, do I change who I am? If I open my hand, am I losing or gaining? By choice or not, to be a Christian in the last few years is to have confronted some version of this experience. It is a cultural moment—a necessary moment—for reckoning, questioning, evaluating, deconstructing. I haven’t deconstructed. I don’t want to walk away from my faith, from Jesus—I want the opposite, in fact. But I have emerged from recent upheaval with the certainty that questions cannot be avoided, no matter how terrifying they seem.
Isn’t love stronger when it’s been tested? Isn’t gold purer when it’s faced fire?
Some things you can’t know until you go through them. Never say never attempts to impart this wisdom, but it has to be earned. I just knew I would never get Botox. I didn’t know how squirmy it would feel to see time stamp itself on my face, to notice three decades of my particular facial expressions etching lines on my forehead, my cheeks. I didn’t like the wrinkles. And I didn’t like myself for disliking the lines. I wanted to be just as cool about the changes as I said I would be, yet no amount of body positivity or personal pep talk could erase my initial perception of facial wrinkles as a flaw. My mind believes that these literal records of time are an authentic part of who I am and my life story. My heart occasionally balks at the way they look. Belief ran right into lived experience, and I wasn’t prepared for the mismatch.
This piece is hard to write because the issue is nuanced, and I like black-and-white far more than I want to admit. Because there are two layers happening here, like two levels of clouds moving at different paces. The easy layer to talk about is the undeniable cultural shift in beauty and body standards. For all its embrace of “body positivity,” Gen Z and beyond is still growing up in an image-saturated world with unprecedented access to social media and we are only beginning to see the effects on their body image and mental health roll in. Spoiler alert: so far it’s not great. I watch in awe as they routinely drop cash on eyelash services and those nails or, more permanently, brow lifts and and nose jobs. Maybe it’s all for fun and self-expression now, but what will happen when they develop wrinkles or go gray or gain weight they didn’t want? And if all the Millennial women get injectables etc. now, then what, as we keep aging—is it fillers forever? How will our grandchildren view the natural process of growing older?
The deeper layer is more conflicted and it’s more personal. I’m not being completely forthright—because while I swore fiercely I’d never get Botox, I also said the same thing about breast augmentation. I’m still firmly in the no Botox camp for myself (albeit with far less judgment) and I couldn’t tell you where I am anymore about breast augmentation. The fiery pronouncements of a fifteen-year-old have cooled fifteen+ years further into the complexity of life. More personal and permanent and private than Botox or fillers, the procedure attempts to answer different questions than the ones Botox does—but one fundamental question is the same: if I look better, will I feel better? And honestly, isn’t this question the engine behind every single tweak we make to our appearance, no matter how small or innocuous? Where do we draw the line?
Drawing the line is hard. It’s tempting to let someone else tell me where it is so I can toe it. What we can’t know when we’re young is how complicated life becomes. No one understands what we’re getting into when we get married or become a Christian or swear a series of I will never. Convictions aren’t real until they’re tested, until they move from theory to practice. The ones that survive the crossing are richer for it.
I suppose my resistance to Botox culture is more resonant now that I’ve had my first taste of aging in the same way my belief in Jesus is deeper after going through fire. Maturity requires a willingness to reconsider, to change your mind. But it also calls for holding fast to conviction amid strong currents. Finding the balance—that appears to be the work staring at me. In knowing more, somehow I know less. I am learning I can change my mind and still be faithful. I can let go without leaving truth behind. I am learning what to hold tight.
My body was made dynamic. Time writes itself on my life and my body responds. I hope that my mind will too.
current status
drinking :: Latitude Adjustment // Summer is long in the rearview mirror now, but on our extended beach vacation with friends, we bought orgeat to have Mai Tais with a themed dinner early in the trip. This left us with a surplus of orgeat, so Walker discovered the Army & Navy, a classic, orgeat-starring gin cocktail, which we promptly renamed in honor of our trip’s general vibe. It turned out to be my favorite drink of vacation—creamy, bright, refreshing, delicious. Absolutely worth buying that bottle of orgeat you’re not sure you’ll ever finish.
contemplating :: BeReal // I am sorry to my husband and friends who’ve had to hear my endless thoughts about the new-ish social media app that’s designed to contrast the dominant social platforms of the day with its focus on authenticity. Once a day, at some unpredictable time, the app prompts users to snap a photo in a two-minute window—or two photos, rather, as it engages both the front-and back-facing camera (a constraint that eliminates much of the ability to control the visual narrative of the image). You can’t view your friends’ images until you post yours. You can’t filter it. And it all disappears the next day so you don’t get sucked into an endless scroll. There’s not a curated story you can tell about your life with BeReal. Instead, you realize how mundane your life actually is (i.e. well, here I am in car line again) — but more than that, how mundane your friends’ lives are too. Somehow, being invited in to view all those banal moments feels more meaningful—more real—than any artful Instagram snap could.
reading :: Fates and Furies (Lauren Groff) // I read this book a few years ago when it was the buzzy book to read (it was a finalist for a National Book Award). I didn’t like it at all then. But I re-read it recently and was blown away by her writing. Don’t get me wrong: I still find it grim and wouldn’t willy-nilly recommend it unless I knew you would like it, but Groff’s prose is on fire—alive, crackling, explosive. I just wasn’t ready for this two-sided examination of a marriage on my first read. Recently, I listened to Wesley Morris discuss the experience of engaging with art in a completely different way after revisiting it some years later, and it’s an idea I haven’t been able to shake since. Of course we change with time—and that means the way we perceive and evaluate art changes too.
cooking :: Red Wine Beef Ragù // Do you need to feel cozy now that the temps are finally dropping? Do you need to eat a meal that feels like curling up on the couch in sweatpants, but maybe in very luxe cashmere sweatpants? You should make this red wine ragù, a braise with a bit of work on the front end that turns out delicious and luxurious. It does not turn out beautiful, but you can help that with a little parm and fresh basil and honestly, who cares. Serve over polenta or buttered pappardelle, invite friends to share it, open a good bottle of wine.
reading :: How Short Will Songs Get? (Ted Gioia) // Really interesting critique of the current trend in the music industry: extremely short songs designed to match our equally short attention spans. But Gioia argues that “… a short attention span is an obstacle to musical enjoyment, not its source. It’s like the difference between looking at the menu in a restaurant (which experts tell us ought to be a quick, easy process), and actually enjoying the meal. If you study the greatest restaurants, you realize that the menu is short, but the meals are long. I fear the music business has gotten these two things confused...” He predicts there will be a hunger for “longform” music with a shift in the way music is written and consumed, noting that “repetition and lockstep formulas” signal the end of an artistic era and the birth of something new.
listening :: Every song here is moody, but that’s where my emotional gauge has settled more often than not. Killer + The Sound — Phoebe Bridgers & Noah Gundersen. An older song, but I recently heard it for the first time and I can’t shake its plaintive sound. / Let Down — Radiohead / Spiral — Wye Oak / Only Friend — Valley Maker / Ever New — Beverly Glenn-Copeland (reworked by Bon Iver and Flock of Dimes). / Double Fire — It’s fall now and I actually made a very specific playlist for it. I think it sounds like driving solo through the mountains with a big decision on your mind.
watching :: The Bear // Unless something unexpected comes along to surprise me, this eight-episode season is going to be my favorite show this year. It follows the story of a young supernova chef (think Noma and Eleven Madison Park) who returns to Chicago when he’s suddenly inherited his brother’s Italian beef sandwich shop after the brother commits suicide. As he stumbles through the fog of grief trying to save the family restaurant, an ambitious sous chef joins his team and the show traces their stubborn, frenetic journey—backward, forward, stalled out, everything on the line always. It is human, raw, restrained, and edited with an impressive eye. It has the texture of real life. And the soundtrack is impeccable! Note: true to its setting (a restaurant kitchen, Chicago), the show has a lot of language, so if that bothers you, I’d avoid this one.
loving :: Zapp’s Potato Chips // I’d like to think I’m pretty impervious to podcast product recs, but when I heard about Zapp’s potato chips for the first time, I hied to the store to try a bag. Maybe everyone else already knows about Zapp’s? Either way, I have to live my truth, which these transitional fall days involves stomping around in Blundstones and shorts munching on Zapp’s Spicy Cajun Crawtators straight from the bag. The crunch is exquisite. Sublime. No other chip has ever matched it. So far, I’ve liked every flavor, but I’ve gotta get my hands on the Dill Gator-tators. Decant a bag of Zapp’s into a big bowl for your next friend gathering / binge watching sesh and upgrade your life.
reading :: “The Nora Ephron We Forget” (The New Yorker) // Listen, if you’re in a specific age bracket of very online women or married to one, you maybe feel like you’ve heard enough about Nora Ephron. This essay is an invitation to reconsider, to push aside the sentimental Nora people think they know to see the writer she actually was: “….an artist whose interest, above all, was in verbal precision.” Symes argues that Ephron was a “close reader” of people and that the trait is what made her work great. What I loved best about this piece was line: “She read people closely, which was an act of care, and she gave ample line edits.” I, too, am a close reader of people, and I like thinking it about as an expression of love.
the real feel
The thing about low-hanging fruit is that you have to pick it. Flowers also have to be picked, but thanks to the marvels of capitalism, someone has already done that work for you, in addition to arranging and packaging a ready-to-go bouquet. Let me paint with a very broad brush here: since most women like the gift of flowers, why are most men not giving their partners flowers more often? To clarify: this is an u n b e l i e v a b l y easy win. Buy flowers at some unexpected time. Surprise her with them. She feels seen and loved and known, and will feel this way every time she walks past the flowers. It’s a timed-release dose that delivers all the powerful effects of Iloveyou and Iwasthinkingaboutyou over the course of multiple days. An incredible ROI for your fifteen bucks, I’d say.
I’ve spent my nine years of marriage trying to figure out what the male equivalent to surprise flowers might be—personally, for my own husband, but also generally, out of curiosity. I’ve come up short. Nothing translates quite the same way—not a steak, not a latte, not a car wash—which is annoying because surely I’d often punctuate the ordinary rhythm of our days with a similar gift of surprise and delight, if only I could figure out what it is. I write this with my car parked a few floors away, gas tank comfortably full—which is not how my husband found it this morning or really ever. Low-hanging fruit. It’s everywhere.
funk busters
swiping on lipstick / setting a vibe / a sweaty run / hot hot bath / despair cleaning / remembered fragment of a well-timed Bible verse / sitting on steps, any steps / clicking down a city street in a block heel / autumn light / catching a breeze / Desi calling me “Ma” / making a to-do list / unexpected hug, even better, unexpected kiss / leaning hard into the thing I don’t feel like doing / pulling together a bang-up pantry meal / bulldozing through a sink full of dirty dishes / dumping out the junk drawer of my feelings to someone who loves me / floral perfume of a perfect citrus twist / vacuuming when my internal GPS is stuck re-routing /
comment and tell me yours too…
Until next time — hunt for a sweater at a thrift store, reach out to an old friend you haven’t talked to in a while, contemplate the merciless blue of an October sky.