Is this me?

Here in Bonnie Scotland the nights are drawing in, and being surrounded with autumn colour in all its rich glory, I was struck last week by how pasty my face looked in the morning mirror.  

With the sun-kissed glow of summer long gone, I looked a bit too Hallowe’en ghost for my liking.  Face needs brightening up I thought.  A little autumnal makeover.  I know, I will treat myself to a new lipstick.  
 
After some thought and some You Tube viewing for inspiration not necessarily helpful I decided on a brand and a colour and with a few key taps on John Lewis’s website, my new brighten-up-my-face-for-autumn lippy was winging its way to me.  It arrived yesterday and I wore it for the first time today.
 
I didn’t say a word other than my usual “morning” when I walked into the kitchen, just waited to see if there would be any reaction.  Lola trotted over to me in her usual enthusiastic greeting and after I had fussed over her, I straightened and caught David’s eye.  The conversation went as follows…
 
“Morning.  Oh!  You look different.” Involuntary expression on face subtly hinting that different may not necessarily be a good thing.
 
“Yes, I bought a new lipstick.  Decided my face needed to be brightened up a bit for the new season.  What do you think.  Do you like it?
 
David, frantically trying but failing thanks to my poker face to gauge whether or not I liked it before answering… “Erm, yes.  No.  I don’t know.  I mean I’m not sure.  It’s different.  Yes, I think I like it.  It’s a nice colour.  It’s just… it’s not really you.”
 
And his entirely predicable reaction brought me face to face with a question that’s been going round and round in my head every morning for a few weeks now when I look in the mirror, and that question is….is this me?
 
Now please feel free to stop reading from this point on; assuming you still are reading that is, as the rest of this blip is really just me trying to get my head round this question and hoping that getting my jumbled thoughts down in writing may help clarify things for me. 
 
And actually it’s not even that big a question.  By that I mean I am not looking deep into my soul to find the meaning of life or purpose of my existence, it’s  much shallower than that.
 
None the less, this question of who I think I am and how this differs to how others perceive me, is a question I want to explore further.   I also look forward to discussing with friends (over some gin of course) their perspective on it when they apply the same question to themselves.  Are they who we think they are?  But I digress!
 
So, is this me? 
 
Well as all the best questions do, instead of leading straight to answers, they lead to more questions (which in turn will hopefully lead to answers) 


The questions that follow on for me are:-
 
 When a person changes their appearance in some way and are told “it’s not you” what does that actually mean?
 
Why can a tiny change in our appearance put other people’s perception of us out of kilter?
 
Is it as simple as the person just looks different so don’t look like “themselves” or is it that the change, however small,  leads to a confusion in others that perhaps leads them to question how well they know someone.
 
Will it have the same effect on others who know you less well?
 
Does it set off a warning bell that maybe something familiar is changing and that causes feelings of anxiety in those closest to you?
 
Or is it just that in David’s case, he was too polite to say “What the f*ck have you got on your lips, your mouth looks like a post box?”  I suppose only he can answer that :-)))
 
So, does the person I see when I look in the mirror look like me, or more accurately, how I perceive myself? 


I should point out this is not about vanity or ageing.  It’s not about looking in the mirror and thinking I look fine today or my hair is behaving itself today or oh dear, not another grey hair.  No, it’s about asking myself if my physical presentation of myself really reflects the inner me.  Or have I and do we all (well most of us – we all know at least one rebel) to a greater or lesser extent, spend our lives conforming to other people’s expectations of us and therefore their image of us?
 
Thinking back, as a four year old, I didn’t think twice about wearing my bright orange skirt with green tights, purple jumper and yellow and pink polka dot cardigan.  I liked them all so wanted to wear them together, and felt fantastic when I did.  I felt “like me.”  The difficulty comes when I try to remember when this notion of feeling “like me” actually changed from feeling “like me” to “thinking I felt like me" but I was actually feeling like other people’s idea of who I was and presenting myself as such.
 
I wonder if it started with school and the compulsory wearing of school uniform?  (That’s a whole other debate in itself.  But for the record, I loved wearing my school uniform and that probably tells me a lot about my willingness to conform.)
 
As a teenager, when I had the freedom to (i.e. out of school), I definitely wore clothes and presented myself in ways that made me feel “like me.”  Such demonstrations of individuality instigated much eye rolling from the adults in my life, but that was partly the point and an indicator that I had got it right.  Of course the irony of the teenage years, is that in thinking we are different, we are conforming to the whims of the fashion industry and indeed, peer pressure.  I never felt so individual as when I looked like everyone else :-) 
 
On leaving school and entering the workplace I left school uniform behind and moved onto office uniform.  Smart trousers or skirt, shirt and jacket.  All that was missing was the tie!
 
From school girl to workplace, to being a wife, to becoming a mum, to being a mum having to interact with lots of professionals in formal meetings regarding Alan’s care, to going back to the workplace and setting up and running a Family Support Service for thirteen years, all of these situations, and many more facets of my life, influencing mine and other’s perceptions of what it means to “be me.”
 
Given all of that, there is no escaping the fact that when choosing how to present my physical self to the waiting world, I have spent virtually my entire lifetime presenting myself to suit the roles my life demands me to play. 
 
I hope this doesn’t sound like I got up every morning looking longingly in the wardrobe at some outlandish outfit whilst begrudgingly pulling on black trousers and an M&S top.  That wasn’t the case.   I know if I had turned up at a formal office meeting dressed like an explosion in a paint factory I wouldn’t have felt more like me.  I would have felt silly and inappropriate but it might have been fun to see people’s expressions.  That sounds very contradictory to what I am saying but I shall ignore that and move on :D 
 
So where are all these ramblings taking me?  Am I any closer to reaching a conclusion?
 
I suppose I have come to conclude that whilst for the majority of my life I have presented myself to suit other people’s perceptions of me, it also, for the most part, suited my perception of myself within each area of my life.   I played my part and I suppose I still do.
 
But now my perception of myself is changing helped along by this quote by Emily McDowell.
 
“Finding yourself is not really how it works.  You aren’t a ten dollar bill in last year’s winter coat pocket.  You are also not lost.  Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are.  “Finding yourself” is actually about returning to yourself.  An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.”
 
I have finally reached the age where I am beginning to feel I no longer have to conform.  It’s time to just be me.  It’s exciting and scary and I would go as far as to say, feels almost like a re-birth perhaps some would no doubt say a mid-life crisis!
 
Whilst I may not go back to quite how I presented myself as a four year old, this week it's Electric Pink lipstick, next week long, jangly earrings and a poncho!  I have actually bought a poncho :-))
 
In the words of the great Pat Kane…you better watch out world.
 
 
P.S. For the record, by the time I ate my sandwich for lunch, my Electric Pink lipstick was all over my fingers and thumbs, my teeth, my water glass and meandering across my face leaving me with a more than a passing resemblance to this guy. 
 
Perhaps my fatal flaw is not recognising that David actually knows me better than I know myself!  Time will tell ;-)))