A Taking Care of Myself Moment 2: Aesthetic Boogaloo

In our latest and most cleverly titled Taking Care of Myself Moment, we've got a feature which I promise not to get in the habit of, not so much for your sake as the reader, but for mine as a lazy, somewhat fickle writer. I'm referring, of course, to narrative continuity. The topic of this Moment flows organically from the last post. Maybe less so since I'm taking an entire fucking paragraph to point it out.

Anyway, when I was in the throes of my fugue state about that BOY, one of the things I started to do to cheer myself up was another one of my Beautify Buddy projects. This one was focused on my hair. The day of my little breakdown (which was at work, btw. Yup, Tess McGill eat your heart out. I'm climbing to the top in this business fast.) I thought maybe going to one of my favorite places in the world and buying some stuff might help.

I've already mentioned, I believe, that Sephora's selection of men's items is pretty pitiful, particularly so at the Columbus Circle Sephora. After some hunting and browsing and coming to terms with my own masculinity, I found two intriguing products from the good people at Bumble and bumble.

Bumble and bumble Styling Wax

Sephora-$26

I decided to take Auden's advice (as though I ever have to think about taking Auden's advice on anything hair or style related.) and give the Bumble and bumble Styling Wax a go. As waxes and pomades go, this one is pretty impressive. It has a nice, subtle grapefruit aroma to it, and emulsifies on the fingers more quickly and evenly than any other wax I've seen. At the end of the day, though, it is a wax, with the attendant shortcomings. Sticky waxes are great for very short, messy haircuts like spikes. Once your hair gets longer than an inch or so, and even the silkiest wax becomes too tacky and unwieldy.

Bumble and bumble Hair Powder-brown

Sephora-$35

I saw this on the shelf next to the styling wax and was fascinated. Hair powder, or dry shampoo, is used to take away that greasy, shiny look your hair can get from styling product or when you've gone a bit too long since your last shower. I tried it and loved the way it made my hair look. At the end of the second day using it, however, I couldn't ignore the drawbacks. Every time I touched my head my hand came away with dirty brown smudges. My pillowcase got ruined (yes I washed it out. Or I tried to.) there was a layer of brown film on everything in my bathroom, and even after two thorough scrubbings my bathtub still looks like I had diarrhea in it. So, despite its fabulous appeal, the hair powder is officially relegated to special occasions.

As part of the reclamation process, I got my hair did. Now, you may have heard that New York City can cost a pretty penny to live in. This is no lie. So I did some research on beauty schools and made myself an appointment at the Aveda Institute in Soho. Got my hair done in a new style I totes love, and got my eyebrows waxed. (The unibrow was making its presence known.) All for $30. Which also led me, a few days later, to buy a better styling product for my longer hairstyle.

Aveda Light Elements Texturizing Creme

Aveda-$23

This was the product my student stylist used after cutting my hair, but I didn't buy that day because I had just bought my Bumble and bumble stuff a few days before. Well, after two days of trying to get the wax to work to get the right style, I broke down and bought a jar of the texturizing creme. It does an amazing job of styling hair without making it look too greasy or product-y (Yes, we're going to pretend that's a real word.) It also smells amazing. It smells of orange peel and something botanical I can't put my finger on. But it's amazing.

So, that's how I took care of myself this week, by spending over $60 on products I'm not even using anymore. Live and learn. As always, I encourage submissions of how you took care of yourself this week in the comments section.

Heaving Las Vegas

It's been a while since my last post.

Sorry about that. Life happens. There IS a long, heart wrenching drama behind this, and I'm sure I'll recount it in detail at some point, but some of the details are still too painful to revisit. Suffice it to say that I met someone. For a very brief moment it seemed like he could be someone really special. We had a connection, so much so that we exercised a lot of restraint in our physical intimacy.

That restraint went for naught a week later sitting in an HIV clinic in the Village crying hysterically, wondering what it wrong with me. I mean, it's not enough that I have to pick guys who break my heart. I have to find the ones who will kick me in the balls on the way out the door. This guy made a point of hurting me as much as he could when he decided he wasn't into me. It made me question myself, all the progress I've made thus far, my very sanity. It is without doubt the single worst moment in my sobriety to date. I think I came very close to killing myself. At least when I was drinking, blackouts could help me avoid the pain, postpone it for a while. The gifts of sobriety, of course, are that I get to be fully aware for every awful moment in technicolor. 

The long and short of it is that I literally cried for four days nonstop. I even cried in my sleep. I shit you not. I would wake up crying, my pillow sopping wet in spots. I had no faith in others, no faith in myself. I wanted to die. I wanted to close my eyes and never feel anything ever again. Relapse was only a threat in that it would have been the chosen means of suicide. I wanted to "Leaving Las Vegas" my way out of this world.

I don't know what happened, what pulled me out. 

It helped that my first instinct was to reach out, both to Auden and my sponsor. I told them I was hurting and that I didn't know if I was safe, that it was more about my life than my sobriety. They were there for me as I wept. I don't think I heard more than 10-20% of what either of them said to me (sorry if you're reading this, guys!) but just to know that they were there, just to know that they cared enough to drop everything to be there for me. It made me want to stick around just long enough to see if maybe tomorrow might not hurt as much.

Eventually it did. I just put one foot in front of the other. I went to work. I went to meetings. The thought of him is still painful. The worst and perhaps most shameful aspect of that is that there is still some part of me that wants to see him again, to kiss him and hold him in my arms, pretend none of that awfulness ever happened.

But it did. I'm a little older, wiser and less trusting.

And that's sad.