MedSpa

The last time I took a Xanax was in Los Angeles. My boyfriend drove me home from Beverly Hills while I peeked out of the cracked window like a chihuahua, wind in my hair as we coasted down Sunset. I nodded along to the song he was playing and didn’t think about the directions. I had an empty girl head and slumped my liquid body against the door in comfort, my man at the wheel. I had a facial girdle wrapped around my head. I had gauze under my jaw. Something was draining out of me.

That was a couple of years ago. Today, I got Botox in TriBeCa. The kind woman asked me to sit down on top of parchment paper and gave me a hand mirror. I recoiled — “Oh no, nothing for my face,” I said. In the interest of journalistic integrity, you should know that I do not have any fine lines or wrinkles. I am twenty-four and Italian and addicted to sunscreen, if I must explain further. But part of me wanted to see what she would suggest. Certainly, I thought, it must be some kind of clinical or ethical violation to offer to freeze a face that is already, mostly, smooth.

I am not a great candidate for facial Botox. Here’s what I am a great candidate for: microneedling, chemical peels, general liposuction, cankle reduction, hair transplant surgery, veneers, laser hair removal, lymphatic drainage, and more things that I am probably not yet aware of or have not yet been invented. The previous list of procedures has been curated for me, specifically, by a medical professional. They gave me the rundown after my treatment in LA, right when the benzo was kicking in. It was sort of like when you finish a YouTube video and are directed to a menu of other options.

“If you’re interested, going forward,” the nurse practitioner had said, “here’s what we recommend for aesthetic coherence.” He went through the options, helpfully commenting on exactly which aspect of my physical appearance could be improved and by which procedure. At the end, he put his hand on my shoulder. “Luckily, though, the elasticity of your skin is pretty amazing. I wouldn’t touch it with Botox for at least another few years.” Then he winked like I was in on some kind of secret. I remember feeling smug that, probably, other twenty-two-year-olds were being recommended Botox. I didn’t think about how many other people might have had medically notable cankles.

Sometimes I wonder, had I never lived in Los Angeles, would I have gotten the procedure? But that’s a tricky set of equations. Had I never gained thirty pounds, had I had a different mother, had I been born in Minnesota, had I never been born at all… There are many forces at play and, therefore, so many to blame! Should I start with my mother?

The truth is that I have a career that involves regularly fielding hundreds of photos of myself, all shot from a low angle. The truth is also that I lived in Los Angeles, where I once joined a luxury gym and realized that people were legitimately seeing through me, as though I wasn’t there at all, and where people regularly leaned up against me in public, mistaking me for the wall. The truth is that I was depressed. The truth is that I was getting targeted advertisements. The truth is that I went to Beverly Hills and got a layer of fat sucked out from underneath my chin. They call it “airsculpting.” It is liposuction.

The list of recommended procedures swims around my mind every once in a while. It’s smart — suggesting most things, but not everything, to maintain the illusion that the priority is not draining the most amount of money from the biggest suckers, but aesthetic coherence. They used words like that. Coherence, balancing. They never said “plastic surgery.” It was as if you’d been born slightly out of alignment, and they were there to help tweak you back to normalcy.

To me, it seemed like a promise of legibility. A consistency between inward and outward. A straight line. A clear pane of glass.

As a teenager, I’d pennyboard around the cul-de-sac of my apartment complex with my headphones in, all but screaming along to Lana del Rey, “I’VE GOT A WAR IN MY MIND!” People were confused by me and worried for me. I often felt as though I lived completely alone inside my head. There were some things I didn’t like about myself, things I fixated on. In the simplest way, I felt that ridding myself of what bothered me would make my life easier. It makes sense when you put it like that.

I still make occasional trips to a MedSpa for Botox underneath my arms as treatment for hyperhidrosis. Today, after bonding with the similarly affected practitioner about the inconveniences of the condition, she lifted up my arm and exclaimed, “WOW, you are a sweater!” I no longer felt kinship with this woman.

I almost never think about my liposuction. I’m not sure what this says about me. In some ways, I thought it would change my life. It didn’t. Most people in my life can’t notice the difference. But I also never think about my chin anymore. Is this an improvement? Most of me thinks that the most feminist thing someone can do is refuse to bow the knee to heteropatriarchal beauty standards. A small part of me thinks of all the hours I’ve saved not thinking about my chin — hours I’ve spent laughing with my friends or making art instead. I removed the concern by removing the problem. In my more zen moments, I try to remove the concern by removing the concern. Could I have meditated my way to this conclusion instead? Maybe. And mostly, I wish that I had. I wish I had been more perfect in my pursuits. I wish I had turned away from the light of advertisement, of artificial alignment. Sometimes I feel like there is no difference between me and the ocean. Sometimes I zoom in on other women’s pictures on Instagram. I am difficult to explain. I am not cohesive. I feel a lot of ways about everything.