Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson Page A

THIS?”
    Laura was in. “Sign me up. I’m going to hang up now before you convince me that being friends with you is too good for my self-esteem. Call me if something else medieval and torturous opens up. Like nipple waxing. Or bloodletting.”
    And that was all it took. Because we were broken women who were all about paying stupid amounts of money to protect our sensitive face skin until someone offered to burn it all off for even more money.
    I’m not sure why women are often so vulnerable to every suggestion involving our faces but for me it’s like I’m having an abusive relationship with my own head. I use nothing but soap and water until one of those mall beauticians stops me on my way to buy a pretzel to tell me how bad I look and convinces me to lavish my face with an expensive cream that makes me immediately break out, probably because my face is not used to being cared for and is panicking. Then I have to buy different expensive creams to fix the breakout. I’m told I need something to open up my pores so they can breathe, and the next week I’m assailed by shame-based commercials telling me that my pores are so big gophers have fallen into them, so I buy something for that too and suddenly I look like I have very fancy leprosy. Then my dermatologist says, “ What have you done to your skin? Stop everything you’re doing. Just use this cream to clear this all up.” But when I put it in my medicine cabinet I realize it’s the exact same cream that started this mess, but ten times as expensive because it came from my doctor. Then I’m like, “FUCK YOU, FACE. I’LL BURN YOU OFF WITH FRUIT ACIDS AND DIAMONDS.”
    In truth though, I was a bit concerned about the whole process. I remembered watching Slim Goodbody on TV, an odd white guy with a small Afro who wore a full-body leotard with the inside of the human body painted on it, which made him look as if he’d been flayed alive. He was like a terrible precursor to those Body Worlds corpses they show at museums-that-have-given-up-on-being-actual-museums, and I worried that I might end up looking like Slim Goodbody’s estranged sister, Fatty Noskin.
    The next day, Laura and I arrived at the clinic and immediately felt out of our element as we huddled together on the couch and gazed at women who looked as if they’d had fat sucked out of their clavicles and injected directly into their lips.
    We signed a pamphlet that explained the risks but that also promised we’d end up with “thicker skin,” which I think meant our faces would get huge and our feelings wouldn’t get hurt as much. I felt conflicted. “So I’ll gain inches … but on my face. I’m paying to get fat-faced.” Laura looked at me uneasily and we considered running, but then a nurse came to bring us back to the exam room. She was sweet and nice and she looked like she was thirty-five but she said she was in her fifties. Laura assumed she was a poster child for the process. I assumed that she was a compulsive liar.
    The nurse had each of us put her head into a glowing machine that took a series of pictures of our faces and then she used those pictures to scare the ever-loving shit out of us. She showed us sun damage and scarring, and then she showed us the picture that made me stand up and shout, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?”
    It was a colony of bacteria living on my face.
    â€œHoly shit,” I said, while peering in at the large green clusters across my nose and forehead. “There’s an entire alien race camping out on my face. It’s like a fucked-up version of Horton Hears a Who! EXCEPT THAT THE WHOS ARE SQUATTERS LIVING ON MY FACE.”
    â€œIt’s pretty normal,” the nurse tried to assure me. “It’s just bacteria.”
    I stared at the nurse. “THERE ARE LIVE CREATURES SQUATTING ON MY FACE AND YOU ARE GOING TO KILL THEM.”
    â€œ Well.