My face is long. I don’t mean that I am sad (as in: “she had a long face because she dropped her ice cream cone on the pavement”) but merely the obvious, my face is not a perfectly shaped heart, oval, square or round. It has always been an elongated oval.
When I was a little girl, I was embarrassed that I looked bad in hats (a bit like a mushroom) and that sunglasses weren’t immediately flattering. Worse, you know kids can be cruel when they think someone is different in any way. My long face wasn’t that long–hardly the stuff of freaks, but still, I was self-conscious. It was self-imposed anxiety I lived with for decades. And, since it isn’t reasonable to change the shape or size of your face, I eventually just got used to it.
Once, when I was about eight years old, my mother commented: “when you are older you will appreciate the fact that your face is long now, because it will change, nicely when other women are worried about their looks.
I had NO IDEA what she was talking about.
Fast forward to fifty (or so):
I looked in the mirror the other day and something was different.
It was my FACE!
Suddenly, the long oval that I disliked was a soft oval, or maybe a longish round. Time and age has reshaped it.
It doesn’t look bad actually, but it’s not my face!
But then again, now, it is.
My mother’s prophecy has come true. Gravity has either been my friend or my enemy, depending upon how you view it. My face has filled out and softened into someone else’s vision of me.
Only it is really who I am, now. I’m amazed that what I didn’t want I now miss, but isn’t that the way it goes…that you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone? (thanks Joni Mitchell)
So I guess I’ll have to get used to my new face instead of my long face, and not have a “long face” because my long face has changed.
Happy New Year
Alison