How I Accidentally Got Botox Yesterday

Exactly five days ago I received the most devastating news of my life to date – news involving a person I deeply love. This news hit me like an asteroid would hit the earth – leaving my innermost core in ruins and my sky dark and terrifying. Would I survive this grief? How can I survive this grief? I cannot survive this grief.

The news leveled me. I curled up in a ball on the couch and wailed at the top of my lungs for hours. My husband sat silently beside me with his hand reassuringly pressed against my back. I screamed and I cried and I made strange, primal sounds – deep guttural groans that come out when one is experiencing the kind of extreme pain that laughs in the face of any hopes of keeping it together. I was not going to be keeping it together. And I did not have it in me to care much about the appearance of my breakdown. I’m sure my ever-supportive husband did not either, but I can guess he was grateful that we live in a stand alone house that shares no walls with neighbors.

Eventually, a few days after my episode of “crying until I threw up and passing out on the couch,” the warm and familiar fog of denial washed over me and provided me with some much-needed relief. I was exhausted from crying and denial was just what the doctor ordered. And, at that very moment, even though I did not realize it, the battle lines between grief and denial had been drawn.

As a side note, I firmly believe that denial is a brilliant survival mechanism. Denial dishes out our grief and gives it to us in manageable doses. In so doing, denial saves us from literally dying of broken hearts. Denial is also smart enough to come and go. You move through the grieving process when it recedes and then, when it returns, you get a much-needed reprieve and rest. Frankly, I think denial is entirely misunderstood and underappreciated.

In addition to saving me from collapsing in on myself and becoming catatonic, I appreciate denial for an additional reason. Denial buys me time. And I invariably use this time to assemble my battery of unhealthy and poor coping skills to bolster my capacity for even more denial. Despite the fact that I recognized that my tried and true coping mechanisms were in for the fight of their lives against grief this time, I readied them for battle anyway. Operation: Accumulate sufficient denial to destroy the grief associated with a totally devastating life event, commence.

I decided to begin the fight conservatively and deployed online shopping first. New clothes are a great distraction. As I ordered my third on sale blouse from Banana Republic, it seemed that online shopping was gettin’ er done. Suck it grief. I was feeling a bit better. But, as soon as I hit the “complete purchase” button, the winds suddenly shifted, the tides abruptly turned, and the next thing I knew grief was kicking the shit out of online shopping ten ways to Sunday. What. The. F. Online shopping is no slouch. It has served to save me from countless breakups, shitty grades, and endings of all kinds. Watching online shopping being decimated before my very eyes terrified me. I realized that this grief was a whole different animal.

I needed to regroup. I needed a new strategy. Think Julie. Think. It was clear that online shopping was incapable of continuing the fight. An obvious weakness in my original approach was that it was too conservative – the shopping was merely “online.” I needed to take it up a notch and whip out the big guns. In-person shopping. “I should have thought of in-person shopping to begin with!” I silently reprimanded myself. If I had, grief would not have the emboldened foothold it now held. I could turn the tables still, though. There was time.

I sped off to the epicenter of cheap, but slightly better than mediocre clothes – the Nordstrom Rack. I got down to business straight away. The clerks looked at me as if I was crazy as I heaped article of clothing upon article of clothing and hobbled into the dressing room. But they did not understand. This was war.

As a total aside, Nordstrom Rack has great dressing rooms. They have those mirrors that stretch you out and take off about 15 pounds. And they have three full-length mirrors per dressing room that you can manipulate in order to see your more svelte self from an endless number of angles. If that wasn’t enough, the lighting is soft and even the most entrenched wrinkles are imperceptible. I wish I could just live in a Nordstrom dressing room.

But, back to the retail battleground. Not to ruin the suspense, but, in short, in person shopping got its ass handed to it. Despite bringing approximately 18 items into the dressing room, it soon became apparent that this trip to the Rack would be a bust. Nothing fit quite right and, at the halfway mark, in-person shopping became petered out losing all of its momentum. Grief had crept in for the win. Even worse, I was starting to realize that shopping, in general, was meaningless and hollow. I felt hopeless and lethargic. The eternal asshole grief was taking hold over me and casting its miserable spell.

As I attempted to slink away unnoticed from Nordstrom Rack, I panicked. My arsenal was running low and I did not know how to continue the fight. But then I remembered. Grief has never once defeated a complete and total physical makeover. This is just what I need! My fingers were on fire as I dialed the salon. “Yes, I would like an appointment with anyone as soon as possible and I would like an all over color to make my hair platinum blonde. Thank you. Oh! Oh, and eyebrows. I would like to get an eyebrow wax and could you dye them dark brown, too, please? Great, thank you. Oh, and I need this all to happen today – preferably in the next hour.”

I put my game face on as I sauntered into the salon. My mission: transform myself into a slightly heavier version of Daenerys Targaryen – that total babe from the Game of Thrones Series. Making a drastic change to my appearance is my go to trump card and it works every time. For example, when a former boyfriend’s douche bag dog devoured a treasured object I had saved since I was a baby, I immediately got a perm. I had never had a perm and knew nothing about perms. But, I knew that extreme measures were called for and that a perm, like a highly trained team of Navy Seals, could rise to the occasion.

I had similar hopes for my albino blonde with almost black eyebrows strategy and when my hair was still wet, it appeared that I had chosen wisely. But, as my hair became dryer and dryer, I started to notice something unsettling. My hair was turning out to be more of a gray purplish color, not platinum blonde. Well fuck me. And things got worse. I realized that the color of my eyebrows clashed terribly with my gray/purple hair. I was the embodiment of a nauseating color scheme that would make even a Howard Johnson shutter. I was sporting two colors do not belong within ten feet of each other, and they were sharing space on my face. This was not good.

I was soon fighting back tears. I realized that it was time to admit defeat. Online shopping, in-person shopping, and a complete and total makeover had fought the good fight. But, ultimately, we lost. I needed to accept this. And, after profusely thanking my stylist for my shitty new hair, that’s precisely what I did. I slunk off to my car and lost it. I was out of ideas. I was out of weapons. And grief had won. I cried both out of fear of what the future would hold and because I had wasted a day running from something I could not outrun.

I wanted to be a little child again – that was the only thing that could make me feel better I thought – being little again. Seeing as how that was not an option, I figured it would be best to go home.

Just after I started the car, I pulled the visor down and looked at my face in the mirror. My eyes were stinging and red from all of the crying. Great, I thought. Now watch me get pulled over because I look like I’m driving stoned. Then I noticed something even more prominent than my bloodshot eyes. Ugh! Could my nasolabial folds be any deeper?! I whined out loud to myself.

For those of you who do not know what nasolabial folds are, they are the sadistic lines that run from your nose down to the corners of your mouth. On older women (and me) they look like a parenthesis symbol in the middle of your face. They have all kinds of nice names – marionette lines, trout mouth, etc. I had long hated my nasolabial folds. They made me look like a muppet or a character out of the Simpsons.

And that’s when it happened. Eur-freckin-reka. There is a God. The skies opened up and heaven itself shone down upon me. I realized that I was not down for the count. Grief has not yet won. And I am not out of ammo. I have one final trick up my sleeve. I was going to have to go bigger than I ever have before, but these were terrible feelings like I had never felt before. This was a whole different animal of grief, so, obviously, I needed denial of epic proportions. I would rise from the ashes like a Phoenix and with God as my witness, my denial would come back and destroy this menacing grief.

And such were the circumstances under which I found myself driving to see a cosmetic dermatologist.

When I arrived at the cosmetic dermatologist’s office, I felt like I was visiting a strange alien planet. The doctor showed me around the office, which was comprised of at least six shiny, white, sterile rooms dedicated to different cosmetic aesthetic services. There was the body sculpting room, the laser room – complete with five different kinds of lasers to give you five different treatments (and I swear I saw an anal probe in there), the chemical peel and facials room, the lifting room, and the injections room. As soon as the tour was over, I was ushered into the consultation room where the doctor proceeded to show me a Power Point presentation of the procedures she offered.

After she went over some of her services, she locked her gaze onto my face and evaluated me. “You know, you’re only 37. I don’t want to do any major procedure on you. Frankly, you do not need anything done. What would be best for you would be to just focus on good preventative skin care” she said flatly. Well, that was exactly what I did not want to hear. F that. My heart dropped into my stomach. But then, she focused in more closely. “Except…” she said. “Except what?” I desperately asked. “Well, the only things on your face that ages you beyond your actual age are those nasolabials.”

I knew it! I knew those fuckers aged me! What total assholes my nasolabial folds were. “Yes, they make me look like a muppet! Can you fix this?” I begged her. “Oh, absolutely” she cavalierly responded. I liked what appeared to be her confidence. And I went further, “can you fix them…today?” I asked. “Well, you are my last patient, so I guess I can” she said nonchalantly. Her calm and coolness made me wonder if she had not overdosed on facial fillers to the point where the injections were affecting her brain. But, she had a white coat on that had “MD” stitched on it, so I felt certain that she knew what she was doing, even if she was a walking quaalude.

I was soon sitting in a fancy white leather chair in the injections room. The chair was high off the ground and my legs danced back and forth in jubilant anticipation of my triumphant comeback against grief.

Dr. Quaalude came into the room after I had been waiting for about five minutes. Soon she was opening small boxes and getting out syringes and filling the syringes with unknown fluids. “Will this hurt?” I asked. “Oh no. It’s not bad at all” she said drowsily. I was not reassured. But, no pain, no gain, I thought. I braced myself for the needles, breathed deeply, and thought about how cool it would be to not only dodge the muppet look for a few months but to also feel a little relief from the sadness that had been wiping the floor with me as of late.

Finally. Finally, denial had a chance. I had found a distraction so big and absurd that it was capable of preoccupying my mind to the extent that I could fight back against the deep sadness that had taken up residence in my throat, my gut, and my heart. Long live denial and suck it grief, I thought to myself.

Forty-five minutes later I emerged from the injections room with a face puffy from being filled to the max with artificial who knows what. I felt better. I felt like now I could face grief without dying. The injections may kill me, but grief won’t, I whispered to myself. And for the first time in five days, I smiled. Well, at least I tried to.