Gotten away with… what, exactly? Gotten away with ‘getting some work done’ and no one can even tell?

So what’s the point, then?

Look, shit is starting to happen to my appearance. I realise that I have become quite attached to people gaping when I tell them how old I am. I am becoming disturbingly keen to get that reaction for, oh, the next twenty years or so. I realise that, after a lifetime of looking like a Cabbage Patch Kid, I am happy enough to keep that face, only with less blank staring. But, that shit is starting to happen. I can see the area under my chin, the turkey-wattle area – well, it’s beginning to look like a feckin’ turkey wattle. I don’t look good in scarves — I need every inch of neck that I’ve got. Dammit.

***

I wake up, and it is amazing: my mind, my poor, easily-led, easily alarmed mind, zeroes in on my mouth brackets. Or what used to be my mouth brackets. I think Dr Peter used the term ‘comma’ rather than ‘bracket’ which is so much softer and gentler, but no, I am all about the brackets. They have been the site of constant scrutiny in the last four {six, actually. Maybe eight} months or so, which only makes them worse, because I look at them and frown, and there I go! Digging them in! So much for the ‘detached appraisal’ of the beauty journalist. Yeah.

I wake up, and the area is less sore. I swipe the alarm on my iPhone, conveniently installed on the bedside dock, and removing it {haaaaalp me!} I take a look in the reverse camera. As I’m lying down still, I look even weirder than I think I look in my mind’s eye. I stick the phone back in the thing, and I close my eyes, my fingers gently massaging my jaw, which is rock-hard with tension.

***

Again: the actual process itself was professional, fast, thorough, and assured. Had Dr Peter been a dentist, I would have been like, ‘OMG this dentist I went to!’ And if you ask me for a recommendation for a … well, it’s not a nip and a tuck because: no knives — holy God could you imagine what I would have been like if there had been knives?!? — If you say to me, ‘Sue, these crow’s feet, what do I do?’ I would say, go to Venus Medical in Dundrum. <Not a word of a lie. You can hop on the LUAS and be there from town in twenty minutes, twenty minutes for your tweak, and then boom, back to work, that is your lunch hour.

***

I’ve been trying to take photos to show this, the brackets ‘after’, and have also been trawling old photos for the ‘before’. I have discovered that I make silly faces when I take pictures of myself, I think to acknowledge the absurdity of peering into a device and immortalising my new glasses or a lipstick. I didn’t think there was anything to this, that there was an underlying thing, but there I was, all along, mocking my seemingly regular documentation of myself.

I had always liked drawing and painting self-portraits in art college. What does this mean? I’ll give you vanity, but I don’t think it’s narcissism? <But forealz, what else would a narcissist say?! I just made myself laugh, and today, it doesn’t hurt to laugh. I woke up, and the left side of my mouth was little tender, but I just laughed and I feel like I’ve got the essence of my face, its movement, back. I feel like now, maybe, this wasn’t such a big deal?

Didn’t feel that way on Saturday, though, when I began to focus on the Botox-ed gully between my brows, and wondered: if I put on my riding hat, will that screw up the treatment???

Installment the first, and the second.

To be continued…