Everything We Do (and don’t do) Means Something

or at least we think it does

but also we don’t think it does…

So for the longest time I told myself I didn’t wear makeup because “I didn’t know how to do it” and to be honest, this is the phrase I’ve heard muttered a lot from my clients. We like the idea of it - but when it comes to us we brush it off. Well, I’ve been putting myself through my SELF expression course the last few months and this month I am in the makeup module and I’ve come to the realization that we don’t even know the depths of our self limiting beliefs and what it means to confront them.

Hear me out…

As part of the SELF course, I ask questions surrounding the fears we have when it comes to putting ourselves out there and one of the questions gets us to look into the past to reflect on where our beliefs and fears started from. Remember, I told myself the only reason I didn’t like makeup was because I didn’t know how to do it - but here’s the thing, I didn’t know how to do photography, but I learned that. I didn’t know how to build a website, I learned that. I didn’t know how to run a business, but I learned that. So I had to take myself a bit deeper - why was I OPPOSED to learning makeup or just playing with it.

And I came up with:

It’d make me be seen.

One of the big questions I ask folks is, “What is your fear if you were to do the thing?” (whatever the thing is: wear makeup, try out for a team, start playing an instrument, run a business, do self portraits, etc.) at which point the brain very quickly responds with:

”I don’t know.”

That’s how you know there’s some juicy goodness waiting for you. Your brain is trying to keep you comfortable, but the reality is if you don’t sit in the discomfort for a second you will never realize why you do the things you do.

So, I sat with that question:

”What is my fear if I was to wear makeup?”

And I heard my mind say:

”People will make fun of you, point it out, tell you you did it wrong, and they will think you are playing pretend. After all, what’s the saying? ‘You can put lipstick on a pig…but it’s still a pig.”


Ouch.

So, sitting in that discomfort a little longer and feeling my heart break a wee bit, I asked myself:

”Did that happen to you before?” and “What memories around makeup come up for you?”

and the answers were:

Yes.

and

When I was in grade 6, my friend Stephanie brought a tinted lip balm to school for picture day and I spent the entire day enjoying the feeling of swiping that lip balm across my lips. My mom never really used makeup, so this was my first experience feeling that soft, supple feeling that lipstick has when you first apply it. But obviously, being in grade 6 AND not having access to a mirror I had no clue what I was looking like. AND the teachers let me have my school photos taken like that. A few weeks later when we got our school pictures, my mom was horrified. She said “HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? NOW WE HAVE TO GET RETAKES AND THOSE COST MORE MONEY!” and suddenly, my ‘Good Girl’ identity felt attacked. I had done something bad. I felt humiliated. I felt shamed.

In addition to that, as someone who grew up in a fat body as a child and was essentially teased from Kindergarten onward about it and someone who read a lot of teen romance / dramas - I realized early on I was not going to be the pretty-popular girl. The representations I had access to in the 80s and 90s informed me that you had a choice: you could be the tomboy OR you could be popular. The second one was out automatically for me, so I leaned full force into the first one - convincing myself and others that “I wasn’t like the other girls” (which I now know is a tool of the patriarchy used to pit women against each other.) I saw 2 categories: I could be “high maintenance” which usually meant self obsessed, mean, focused on superficial shit, etc. or I could be “the girl next door” which meant aloof, focused on kindness, intelligence, and being ‘Good.” I mean my representations were the Wakefield twins from Sweet Valley High (I was an Elizabeth, my sister was a Jessica), Betty & Veronica from Archie comics (I was Betty, my sister was a Veronica) and the girl from Little Giants. Also, I remember a movie about a girl that had to pretend to be a boy to play in the band - my strategic thinking told me that if I wanted to get in the places that the boys were I had to become one of them and avoid anything to do with being “a girly girl.”

It isn’t that “I just don’t know how to do makeup.”
It’s that I believed a very specific story about what it meant to be someone who wears makeup and someone who doesn’t.
It’s that this story continued to be further confirmed as I went through my life because now when I do wear makeup, even when others do it for me, I feel incredibly self conscious and very aware that

People are gonna find out that I’m just a pig wearing lipstick after all.

I feel my anxiety rise when I leave the house wearing glittery eyeshadow or a red lip. I am very self conscious and think everyone is looking at me. When people make comments about me wearing makeup, it makes me even more nervous and I don’t know how to take the comments/compliments. Because if I was to become someone who wears makeup….what would that mean?

It means (in my mind) I am someone who is self obsessed, concerned with topical things, high maintenance, etc. all of this boils down to:

NOT GOOD.

And if I am not the Good Girl, then who am I?

The fear I have around wearing makeup has nothing to do with makeup (shocking)
The fear is around losing the identities I am trying desperately to protect because younger Teri is grasping to them.
The fear I have is about being seen and labelled as something I was trying to avoid as a kid.
The fear is around what I’m making makeup mean.

So, I have to parent younger Teri.
I have to remind her that it’s just pigment.
It’s just paint.
It’s just for fun.
It’s just for play.
It’s temporary.
It’s a medium for self expression.

That’s it.
That’s all.