The Story of this Face

By Lian Brook-Tyler

I was talking to a beloved client about her story of becoming free of judgement about her body (she has a powerful offering to guide other women on this journey that’s being birthed soon ).

And it got me pondering further my own journey with this, which is something I’ve been waiting for the right moment to talk about for some time.

I alluded to it in a recent post (see link in comments), it was one line snuck away - or so I thought, of course it was the one line that people commented on the most.

The truth is, I’ve had very little judgement about my body... I guess that’s due to a fairly wild and free upbringing where bodies, nudity and sex (between consenting adults, obv) were seen as beautiful, natural and something to be celebrated, which is something I’m devoted to modelling to my own children. It no doubt helped that I’m fortunate to have a body with all the expected bits in roughly the expected proportions in roughly the expected places.

Instead, all my judgement was laser focused on my face.

I am not being at all faux-humble to say I was the archetypal Ugly Duckling, though for most of my childhood I had no real clue. I was interested in climbing trees, writing plays, rescuing animals, creating Narnia-like worlds and doing magic... ‘being pretty’ was the furthest thing from my mind.

One of my first memories of realising it was even a thing was when I was about eight and my adorable blonde sister won “Little Miss Summertime” at a local beauty pageant.

As well as feeling happy for my sister, I remember feeling a twinge of envy that I wasn’t ever going to win such a prize but then concluded those things weren’t for me, they were just for the pretty girly girls, like her. I had other things to do.

I was a late bloomer and spent my early teens filling my time writing songs, drawing dead relatives and pop stars, looking after horses and my growing menagerie, and filling my mind with advanced psychology texts and failed telekinesis experiments.

I was the love child of David Attenborough, Uri Geller and Kate Bush… though I looked more like Adrian Mole. It might seem unbelievable now, in this world of nine-year-olds devouring YouTube make-up tutorials, but this didn’t change even a tiny bit until I was fourteen.

And then something happened that literally no-one at my school would have predicted (and the ones who called me “Weirdo”, “Boffin” and “Gippo” would deny was possible, even now)... a handsome Spanish exchange student saw someone in me worth kissing. Albeit just once before he flew back home. But once was enough to ignite a whole new obsession in me - I turned my brilliant, creative mind to analyse what exactly boys find attractive and then made myself in that model.

I suspected I couldn’t change the fact that I wasn’t ever going to be the pretty one but I knew my powers of magic, mind control and artistry meant that few would ever guess that.

Several years on, I had this down to such a fine art that people started suggesting I become a model (side note: I actually got an offer from an agency but then was too insecure to do anything about it), and it seemed I might have really created the mythical, romcom transformation from Ugly Duckling to Swan.

Or had I..?

The self improvement legend Werner Erhard said something like… whenever you do X to avoid Y, you’ll only reinforce Y so it’ll never work (Jung said it more snappily with “What you resist, persists.”)

In more prosaic terms, this meant that the more I perfected my mask to avoid being ugly, the more ugly I felt.

I knew I was a duckling in swan’s feathers.

I just hoped that my mastery at applying feathers meant that no-one would tell they weren’t mine.

You know how a throwaway comment can stay with you for decades?

One of those for me was said by a (lovely but exceptionally forthright) young woman at one of my first jobs “It’s strange, everyone says how pretty you are but I just see the make-up.”

So that confirmed what I feared most.

Instead of admitting defeat and throwing down the mask (that’s just not in my nature, though would have been a much gentler ride), I doubled down.

Cue more hours spent perfecting my make-up, more hours memorising Marilyn Monroe’s photographic poses, more hours comparing myself to supermodels and seeing all the things I needed to change about my face, and more hours hiding or fixing anything I saw was anything less than perfect.

We’ll now fast forward a bajillion years because the ending of this story is probably much more recent than you’re expecting… liberation from this mask has only begun to take place over the last couple of years.

I’ll share how that’s happening via a brief pitstop at the point in my twenties when I began suffering with chronic facial pain. The catalyst for the pain is a story for another time but I’m sure it doesn’t escape your notice that the place I felt so much pain is the very place I held so much shame.

I see that over and over again with the women I work with: the place of shame in their bodies is also the place of pain, numbness, disassociation or tension.

And little by little, I saw that the very same Wild Feminine practices and rituals that I was teaching to other women to heal and rewild their relationship to their beautiful bodies, could also be applied to my face… finally liberating me from my psyche’s grip on the mask.

And just to be clear, the mask has always been more in my mind than in the make-up - I’ve always been comfortable with people seeing me without it - I just knew they’d be seeing the real me, not the swan.

As the mask began falling away, I started joining all the dots on the story of my face and more recently, I’ve started sharing some of it with other people: bringing it fully into the light of awareness or said beautifully by Jung in my fave quote “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Me finally writing this post is very much part of this work - and it’s as scary as Hell because I know my mask ceases to work now I’ve pointed it out to you.

By outing our shadows they no longer have the same power… power that’s both trapped us and kept us safe, all at once.

My mask, my prison and my protector, has been outgrown.

And the big reveal… Duckling, swan, pretty one, ugly one? Just me. And it turns out that she’s perfectly OK. There’s nothing to judge here.


Art: me, wild and free (of make-up and mask)

 
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