Everyone in the bar was hot and young. They had sun-bleached hair and nose piercings and wore vintage football tops with white tiered skirts in a way that I never would have thought would work. Looking at them, I felt frumpy, worn out. I hated the tiny braids I’d plaited on either side of my face, I hated my cowboy boots, I hated the spots on my chin, I hated my face and I hated my body and I hated everyone in there because I felt as though they hated me too, even though they were just enjoying their night, laughing and dancing under the twinkling reflections of the disco ball hanging from the ceiling.
I knew I had to leave. I wanted attention from men in a way that can never be good. So I ran back to Moya’s house where the rest of our group was squashed on the sofa together, talking over the end of each other’s sentences, drinking wine out of mugs. I stayed there until I realised it was way too late and I Irish-exited so that I wouldn’t be persuaded to stay, running out to the Uber without my bag or even my shoes.
The next day I went to go and pick up said bag and shoes from Moya’s house looking my worst. I was wearing trackies that were two sizes too small for me, the sort that are worn out and scratchy on the inside from being washed so many times over the years. My hair was scraped back, and I was wearing that Mubi tote everyone has as a rucksack. If I took my trainers off, she would have seen that my socks had chicken feet printed on them.
Moya was trying to persuade me to come to Peckham Rye where some of our friends were, all of them sunbathing in tiny sunglasses and even tinier bikinis. I don’t mind looking like shit in front of friends, but I couldn’t risk seeing someone we knew when I was dressed like this. Instead I went to Telegraph Hill Lower Park (crucially not Upper, where there would be a risk of having to wave at a friend of a friend) and sat there watching people. There was a man doing tai chi by the water fountain, a couple making out. I wondered about their stories, staring a bit longer than was polite. I felt completely invisible, as though, when they looked at me, they saw right through me to the grass on the other side.
I had retreated into what my girls and I often call “troll mode”. Deep down, I know I don’t ever really look like a troll, but sometimes it’s easier to just lean into feeling ugly instead of trying to do positive affirmations or whatever. We will warn each other before dinners out, “Btw I’m in troll mode,” which is code for: I’ll be turning up with spot stickers on, wearing something comfy and easy like Levi’s and a white T-shirt, or maybe something actively unattractive like old gym leggings with a weird geometric pattern on them and a top that doesn’t match. It means: I probably won’t drink much and I’ll head home early and obviously don’t take any group pictures with me in them.
It’s horrible hating the way that you look, but in a small way, it’s also liberating. As a young woman, you become used to always being looked at, men’s eyes following you when you cross the road, when you pass them on the way to the bathroom. Sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it’s exhausting. I notice that women tend to respond to this reality in one of two ways; either they resent the attention, shrinking away from it, or they learn to rely on it – believe they’re not worth anything without it. I’m in the latter group, and to me, being in troll mode feels like a rebuke to my own constant impulse to court the male gaze. When I don’t make an effort, I feel like I’m wearing an invisibility cloak. Of course, men still look, and when they do, it’s kind of worse, because you really don’t want to be seen, but it’s refreshing to no longer be striving for their approval.
It’s also nice to take a break from the effort of trying to look a certain way. People tend to see beauty as something static that you either have or you don’t, but my face looks different to me every day when I wake up. It’s puffy sometimes, and chiselled others. There’s such a difference between no make-up and no make-up. I have such faint eyelashes that if I don’t tint them I look like a smooth, featureless egg. I saw a TikTok of this girl saying she’s either a three or a 10, and all of the hottest women I know are like that.
What I’m saying is: beauty is something you have to do, it takes planning and effort. I reckon almost anyone could be beautiful if they had enough money and time and could be arsed with it. You get home on a Thursday and remember you’re going out over the weekend so you have to do the everything shower, you have to wash your hair and shave and moisturise and then wait an hour for that to sink in before you put fake tan on and then you have to stand there all sticky until it dries. But it’s tiring doing all the plucking, curling, lymphatic draining – and it’s nice, sometimes, not to care, to let things overgrow, like you’re sinking down to the bottom of a very deep swamp.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I fully leaned into troll mode. If I stopped putting retinol on my skin so that my acne rose up in welts around my chin. If I sat in the sun without SPF and let it wither the space around my eyes. If I stopped buying clothes and just wore what was there, stopped the multivitamins and the castor oil packs and the gym. Would I look that different from how I do now? Or would no one even look at me at all?
I don’t have the guts for that. I don’t even want to, anyway. Most of the time, I love being a woman. I love lining my lips with a brownish pink like supermodels did in the ’90s. I love having enough of a sense of style that my friends will send me clothes and say, “This is so you!” I love smearing glittery gloop over my collar bones and getting my ears pierced. I find it so relaxing watching women talk about a new concealer they bought and how they love the formula and then buying it myself and finding that I really do like it better than the one I was using. I don’t want to quit; I just want to take a moment, hide away, disappear, and then come back refreshed, sturdier, ready to dance around under the disco light of a bar feeling people’s eyes on me and wanting them there, like a ballerina rotating around in a jewellery box.