I felt bad about my body, but Emily Wood's Instagram got me offline
Guest newsletter by Sinéad McCausland
I tried to reread Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck, a collection of essays by the writer and screenwriter on being an aging woman, when I got sick at the beginning of this year. Bed-bound for months with pneumonia, which triggered a relapse into an eating disorder that has sat like a bomb under the table since my late teens, I was ill both in body and mind. With no energy or health to do anything but scroll, my screentime shot up from an already impressive six hours a day to around 12 hours. I spent most of my time scrolling Instagram reels and playing with its algorithm, successfully manipulating it into only showing me old Beyoncé videos. Still, despite my best efforts, reels and slides still encouraged me to buy more make-up to get “snatched cat eyes like Bella Hadid” and buy expensive retinols to ‘prevent’ aging.
If you identify as a woman on social media, there is no escaping the constant onslaught of posts telling you that you as you are is not, and never will be, enough. During the months when I was constantly aware of my lungs because breathing had become a task I was aware of my body doing and not just an automatic machine working in the background, I found myself preoccupied with my face; have I spent enough of my time, or my money, on preventing aging? I asked myself, with hundreds of pounds worth of products in my Boots basket from their “trending on social” section, the surefire cure to my anxieties.
While I was trying to control my external body, internally I felt like I was falling apart; I had a terrible reaction to a course of antibiotics I was given, and my fatigue only continued to get worse as the illness proceeded. I felt like a passenger and my body, a train that had broken down at the stop just before “rest.” My body wanted to heal, but my hands, my eyes, my brain wanted The Screen.
In the hopes of countering The Screen, I turned to Ephron. After watching You’ve Got Mail, my comfort film, I picked up I Feel Bad About My Neck, but her first essay, about a group of women at brunch all wearing turtle necks to hide their aging necks, made me too depressed to continue over the prospect women of all generations with or without screens and algorithms have been made to feel like an aging body is something to hide. I thought of Margaret Atwood’s famous “male fantasies, male fantasies, male fantasies” quote, that inescapable male gaze that is in every woman’s mind as we apply make-up, shave our legs, don’t shave our legs, asking, who am I doing this for?
And of Joan Didion’s essay for Vogue, Self-Respect, where she argues, “The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others. (...) To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one’s failings, both real and imagined.” Both self-respect and self-hatred ultimately come down to no one but ourselves. “However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un-comfortable bed,” Didion writes. “Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.” I put down Ephron’s book and picked up my phone.
While scrolling one day, a video appeared of a woman using lip liner to draw on her face like a toddler. She rubbed it in with her hands, drawing and rubbing outside the metaphorical lines, and went on to apply bright, sparkling colours on her eyelids. The make-up artist is Emily Wood, and I’m so grateful her videos broke through the perfection-focused algorithm and came onto my feed. I became obsessed and scrolled through her account, seeing how make-up could be a creative art form and fun. Her focus isn’t using make-up to fit into beauty norms but to express how she’s feeling. Wood is also almost always doing her make-up outdoors, whether on a New York fire escape, in front of London bridge, or in the countryside. And they complement each other. In an interview with Off the Block Magazine, Wood says doing her make-up outside gets her out of “health anxiety and into nature and creativity.” I was inspired.
I put my phone down and looked for the most pigmented things I could find in my make-up bag and went to play on my face. I wasn’t doing my make-up while watching someone on YouTube or Instagram telling me exactly where to place my contour. I didn’t even need my phone near me. I figured out what was right for my face by getting offline and familiarizing myself with my features.
Each time I tried a new look felt like a small, “radical acceptance” of myself. Putting eyeshadow and blushes on my face, I had to be gentle and calm, my hand movements intentional. I was forced to slow down. The therapy of doing something creative, too, and not just scrolling meant my health anxiety about pneumonia, about recovering, was drowned out by the peace of creating. I didn’t take any pictures of my finished looks, wanting to keep them only for myself and not turn them into something to post and share on social media. Soon, I moved away from hating my body for breaking down to learning to love it, and, for the first time in a while, not wanting to change a single part of it.
We’d love to hear your reflections on life online or offline, to write for our guest newsletter get in touch: loggingoffclub@gmail.com
Sinéad McCausland is an Irish-Welsh writer and journalist based in Paris, where she studied her MA in Film. She currently works as a social media and web journalist for Le Monde in English. She has had her creative writing published on Rookie and performed a short story as part of the Porchlight storytelling series.