Yesterday afternoon I left my 9-5 job and drove a few towns over to an affluent part of the county for a nose job consultation. My heart was in my ass. This was something I had been waiting for my whole entire life, so far back as I can remember. Was it first my well-meaning mother, with no filter, apologizing for inheriting my father’s features that did it? Or was it someone in my class at school, the first person to make the grand discovery that they could turn Hailey Noecker into Hailey Nose-pecker. I’m not particularly sure. I just know that it was never a revelation I made on my own, but something someone once told me. And when they made me aware of it, it suddenly existed.
My shnoz is something I’ve mildly come to terms with over the years, but there’s been this incessant need to pull the trigger and fix it lately. Same with getting a Pilates membership and going on juice cleanses. I have a hunch it’s due to the low-grade depression I’ve been weathering post-grad. Maybe because it’s March and I’ve been living at home with my family too long and I’m romance-deprived and I’m pretty sure my house has black mold that’s rotting my brain. My self-esteem has hit an all-time low and I have become incredibly lazy. I don’t apply to jobs I’m qualified for. I delete poems from the internet before anyone views them. I write about being mediocre and depend on subscribers to comment uplifting affirmations that assure me I don't suck, which embarrasses me and digs me deeper down the self-wallowing hole.
So, with my savings finally looking robust, I thought paying a doctor to break and morph my nose into a better nose would give me a kick in the ass to complete delayed tasks and take down the world finally. Because that makes sense.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
But seriously. The only thing I have been able to put major work into is scheduling plastic surgery appointments and figuring out my color analysis. It appears I do have the energy and time for self-improvement. The areas in which I chose to put my energy, however, is alarming.
I’m sitting in the chair next to the plastic surgeon, sweating with anticipation, watching him with his laptop faced away from me while he edits a snapshot he took of my profile. “And just one more…ah-ha. Are you ready to see your new and improved nose?” I gulped and nodded.
He clicked back and forth between each image. The Grand Before And After. The Before girl was me as I am, nothing startling or striking. The After made me uncomfortable. She was beautiful, with the hump on her nose dissolved, making the rest of her features look more balanced and feminine. There was just something… almost uncanny valley about it? Like someone took a picture of me with a snapchat filter, the bug-eyed alien ones that make you look like Kendall Jenner.
“The beauty marks on the right side of your nose throw off the symmetry as well. We can laser that post-op.”
“Oh, that’s awesome.”
Then I got the fuck out of there.
I’m not against plastic surgery. I’ve messed around with fillers. I still would like to get my deviated septum fixed one day. I don’t think that means I dislike myself or lack confidence. But it’s all feeling like another piece of the late-stage capitalistic self-care pie. The kind that promotes excess skincare and therapy and knowing your attachment styles and healing your inner childhood and and and.
I mean to say I believe we’ve become far too self-analyzing, way too introspective as a society yet we hate ourselves more than ever. Even the times where I’ve been in prolonged therapy, I find myself exhausted talking about my “traumas” and “insecurities” and whatever “ailments” I find that plague me. I used to think my parents, old school boomers, were awful at handling my emotional turmoil. They were loving but had a “rub some dirt in it” philosophy when it came to self-soothing, and I feel like that’s served me better than any “shadow work” I’ve done. A TikTok therapist might equate this with some kind of avoidant attachment style bullshit but seriously, sometimes you really need to just touch grass.
Jemima Kirke answered some questions via IG story the other day, and when asked if she had any tips for unconfident young women she replied simply, “I think you guys are too worried about yourselves.” This made me think of GlamDemon2004’s iconic “Spell Pharaoh” TikTok that created some maaajor buzz a few years back. Her point was parallel to Kirke’s in that too much of self-love // confidence culture surrounds external appearance. I wish it was that easy. But it isn’t that easy, even when it is easier than putting the real work in. It’s a far simpler to paint ourselves pretty and rely on head turns and oh-my-god-i-love-your-outfit’s then do the real work. And I don’t mean soul-searching or past life regressions. I mean getting up every morning and really getting after life. Focusing on things that don’t have anything to do with your or your problems.
I’m tired of the fucking mirror. I’m tired of healing. I’m tired of staring at my face, my traumas, my feelings, you know? I am tired of myself. I want to give myself a kick in the ass and not blame my inability to perform on generation trauma or because I inherited an ugly nose or because I gained ten pounds after graduation. Something tells me a nose job and Pilates membership wouldn’t fix me, though it would be nice to think so. I want to leave the narratives and stories that I’m a damaged girl with a deviated septum behind. I’m not Hailey Nose-Pecker, but I am chronically late to everything and need to finish my goddamn book.
Do you know what I mean?
love, h.n<3
i relate to the being tired of urself thing so hard 😭 sometimes it’s just exhausting analyzing and picking apart every life experience you’ve ever had (especially when trying to turn it into something poetic)