Mirror, Mirror

Rachelle Welling Photo

It starts out with a heavy breath as I am looking in the mirror at someone I don’t even recognize. The clock begins as I know that my friends or family will arrive shortly to start the day’s adventure. I realize that I have to start recreating my eyebrows, glue on my lashes, put on my make up, curl my wig and ensure it will not fly off in the heavy city winds. (That would sure be a surprise to an innocent bystander!)

I used to hardly spend even 20 minutes getting myself ready for the day and now it is an entire process. By the end of it, I still don’t even feel like myself. I constantly am feeling like there’s too much make up on or I drew my eyebrows on too dark this time. I stare at myself trying to determine what I can do so that maybe people won’t notice that my hairline isn’t real or that my eyebrows are really just tiny lines drawn on to make it look like a texture. So when people say, “Oh, you look so good today!” I thank them politely, but then am thinking to myself about how I look nothing like myself and how hard I worked to get my eyebrows even. After all, they say your eyebrows are supposed to look like sisters, not twins. I thrived on this philosophy.

I don’t even know what it is like to feel like my natural self. I don’t know what that girl looks like anymore. I see past pictures of myself and just stare at it. It is someone that I used to know. It is that external Sydney that I have talked about previously in my posts, but doesn’t compare to this new internal Sydney that I have grown to love so much. I took for granted how easy it was to apply some brow gel and some concealer and I was ready for the day!

They say, you can’t love someone else until you learn to love yourself. I didn’t realize how true this was until now. As my hair, eyebrows and lashes begin to grow back, I am starting to appreciate how much effort I put in to maintaining my appearance to feel like myself on days where I only saw a stranger staring back at me in the mirror.

xo

Sydney