Accidental Purist

Resurrection time. I’ve been her before. It’s the nature of cycles and seasons. I thought I’d be ready to surface with the start of Spring, but even the grizzlies are late this year.

It’s still the season of Spring cleaning, which means a purge of the camera roll. Imposing an expiration date on this cache of selfies seems appropriate. The photos were to be part of a long aborted project – a daily snapshot of my unadorned face in my fiftieth year. A tribute to making it to the golden marker of aging. This little reel is sufficient as a memento.

I’ve noticed a perverse pattern over the decades. A little time is all that’s needed for me to end up liking a photo of myself that I hated at the time it was taken. Like many women (people?) my lens is faulty when trained on myself. Is distance necessary to focus objectively? Is an objective self view possible?

The year long project was an expansion of my weekly #MakeupFreeMonday posts (another abandoned routine). The saboteur perfectionism lay in wait as I struggled with the little hiccups interrupting a new rhythm. An early start for an audition or self tape meant the selfie had to wait until the end of the day when the makeup came off. The practice never became completely quotidian, and as I missed days here and there, those negating voices found flaw with the project as a whole.

As I scroll through, it’s curious that what I see today, I was incapable of seeing then. Things can, not only appear closer, but clearer in our rear view mirror. Looking back on these images, I can see the effects of too much salt, sugar or alcohol the previous night. I can see the vestiges of a good cry or a bad insomnia. I see how I’ve maintained my skin gorgeously without any interventions, and recognize the bonus of good genetics. I see the rapid loss of key collagen pockets and second guess my no filler rule. And then I see my grandmother.

When I was very very young, from ages 5 to 11, aunts and elders would comment on how I was a carbon copy of her. I never saw it. How could I? My five year old lenses were limited and literal.

When we arrived in Toronto, someone told my mother that the woman in the house next door to our rented flat, was also Jamaican. But more importantly, she babysat a handful of kids after school. One day after this new arrangement was established, I sat at ‘Aunty’ Pearl’s kitchen table with a snack. She stared at my face for a while but didn’t say anything. Then she asked, “What’s your grandma’s name?” “Grandma” “No, her other name.” “Rachel.” I vaguely remember thinking about it before answering. When mum picked us up, we discovered ‘Aunty’ Pearl was grandma’s childhood friend. We were practically family. We likkle but we tallawah, as Jamaicans say, and we always find our own.

I protested that I did not look like grandma. One of them found me a picture of her in her twenties. Five year old eyes cannot see past five. Eventually my eyes matured and I was able to see the resemblance. Today, I see how a loss of collagen has changed the shape of my mouth to more mimic hers. The resemblance is striking. And I wouldn’t have seen that without allowing nature to take its course. Several years after my mother passed I noticed that my ‘baby fat’ had melted into a angles similar to hers. I had never ever ever, been told, (or seen) that I favored my mother. To embrace each new line, or angle is to celebrate each part of my family I see reflected in the mirror.

For the record, this isn’t a post to condemn cosmetic surgeries and procedures. There are myriad reasons I’ve avoided that path, but now that I’ve come this far, I’m a bit of an accidental purist. Or maybe I still haven’t reached a max on the lines I can live with, or the collagen I can live without. Maybe that all changes when I reach the age my mother was when she passed and there are no memories to reference against. But for now, I like evolving and embracing my personal progress. It’s a gift to witness me growing into the women who’ve come before me. I’m glad I didn’t miss seeing it.