A simple and effective 18-step beauty routine for both holes

Previously: My Year of Jung and Yassification

What better time to revisit this topic than having once again returned from a trans-tasman holiday to my real life in the city I’m deeply sick of and having my body immediately break down? The last two times I’ve been in Australia my dermatitis has flared up so badly that I’ve needed antibiotics afterwards. I’m starting to take it personally. This time the night I got back I succumbed to something else that had me sleeping on an ice pack because my ear and throat hurt so badly. In my younger days I could overpower most sicknesses with the force of my will, but now I’m getting absolutely spanked once or twice a year. Yes this is shit late-thirties chat, but it’s wasting my time and I’m very frustrated right now. Last night I had to go to bed at 5pm after walking for 30 minutes. This thing is dragging on for far too long, but my confinement during the worst of it did lead to me solving some story problems. I might know too much about them now and it could ruin them, but I’ll see what I can do.

Stuck in the reality of a porous, reactive, oozing and torpid body I return to the fantasy of being contained, discrete and controlled. Since I last wrote I haven’t really spent any money on my face. I’m spending too much money on therapy, which is at least subsidised by my insurance, up to a point. But I still think about all the botox and lasers I could be getting instead. I started eating meat a few months ago which has been quite good - I was dealing with so much pain from eating, it could have been stress or over-reliance on protein supplements or something else. Anyway it’s been better. I had a gritty and pungent little fad with nigella sativa seeds. I stopped eating dairy and had a beautiful few weeks where I was successfully making coconut yoghurt from probiotics, but I lost the touch and went back on the milkwagon. I got concerned about my neck and started doing some exercises I made up. Occasionally I look up handheld microcurrent devices for the facial muscles on facebook marketplace. Tretinoin has been going well, on the areas of my face that I can use it (you can’t put anything on the type of dermatitis I have). I ran out of it for a few weeks and missed not having any acne ever. I got a prescription from my GP just by asking for it. Nothing too dramatic has happened, positive or negative, but I do get surprised by my reflection sometimes when I’m not wearing makeup - my skin just looks more robust than I’d expect.

Overall I’d say I’m losing at the moment. I have too much going on to stay on top of this thing. Do you ever get those instagram videos about calisthenics that convince you that you should be able to do a backflip? As someone who has never tried calisthenics, sometimes I feel like I should quit my job so I can focus on calisthenics. My targeted content gets pretty niche, somehow it’s found out that I’m hypermobile and it tells me that I shouldn’t be sleeping in the main positions that I can be comfortable in. I’ve had my phone in black and white for a few weeks to be less addicted to it and I’ve kind of stopped looking at that stuff, but before that I would find myself watching some video about gua sha myofascial release and starting to feel bad about myself and then just derailing the whole thing with this beautiful thought-terminating affirmation from Slayyyter:

Gua sha that! I don’t know how she does it, but everything that Miss New Tits says about plastic surgery and the body is somehow the inverse of the joyless, tepid self-care reels that haunt me. The character she plays is so exaggerated that through her we get to experience the pleasure and power of the idealised, customised body without having to change anything - a payoff which may never even arrive after having the actual procedures. Her avowed sexual hedonism makes a mockery of the prim, hypocritical line that beauty regimens are just for women to feel good about themselves. The part that feels good is when you get to fuck. There’s no way out of being looked at and most of us are seeking validation no matter how many knots we tie ourselves in about it. I’m still waiting to see one of those articles about women who’ve given up cosmetic treatments where they’re not tastefully styled in nice lighting with natural makeup. If you’re really about it, let’s see you looking like shit.

Meanwhile, I’m meant to say something about therapy. I am going to a Jungian analyst who has very powerful snow-white hair and lives up a hill in Seatoun. It’s inconvenient and expensive and I’m not sure if I’ll keep going once my insurance runs out, but on the other hand I have too much on my mind right now and perhaps can’t afford not to go. The recurring theme of my dreams at the moment is that I’m not a young woman anymore. There are kids and teenagers and twenty-somethings around with questions and problems that I can’t quite help them with. My family are there a lot too, much more so in my sleeping brain than in real life. Cats and dogs play pranks on me. Sometimes I flirt harmlessly, sometimes men abuse me horribly. But I think I usually come out alright. This year I’ve started to take seriously the idea that I might want to be a parent and it feels like I have to gestate a different version of myself first. That seems like it might be simmering along somewhere. The question is, will she serve?