I need to get rid of this facial hair at the earliest moment I can. This is driving me nuts. Right now, it’s this and my voice that are the two big things that give me problems. I mean, I can manage both, but I’d rather not have to. And this is such an easy thing to deal with… if one has the money. And there doesn’t happen to be a pandemic outside.

My priority for erasing this mess:

1. upper lip
2. chin
3. throat
4. jaw
5. cheeks

The upper lip is most noticeable and darkest and hardest to hide and most psychologically… troublesome. The chin is viscerally annoying and prickly and hard to deal with. Other areas, decreasingly so.

With this neurology I’ve got here, it’s hard to express how much energy it takes for me to shave, and how dizzy and ill I feel afterward, what with all that standing around and waving my arm around and close scrutiny. Physically it wipes me out, never mind the emotional exhaustion from acknowledging it, focusing on it, engaging with it. So, often I don’t. Which on its own makes me feel worse and worse until I do.

When I do—it’s not perfect, but it feels like my whole face shape changes a little, and it’s soft, and I can stand to look at myself, or rest my chin on… anything, really. Part of the mask is scraped away, and I feel like me. It’s this big achievement. All this effort, and now there I am again, Christ. Then repeat the same cycle tomorrow, forever.

It would be such a difference not to have to outlay all that energy, making myself feel awful, so as to not feel a little more awful, every single day. And for it to be completely effective, which this isn’t. For it no longer to be a concern, so I can move on.

I remember when I first heard about laser treatment, maybe 15 years ago—I think it was offered in Japan at that time but not here, so it was this novel thing—and I thought, wow, that would be really desirable, but how could I excuse it? I didn’t have the right yet to want anything. I didn’t see the point of making myself better. I just wanted to not exist, really. So I filed it away to chew over at some indeterminate point that was unlikely ever to come.

It says, I think, a lot that this has been such a growing point of insecurity for me since maybe 1992, and for a decade there it was used as a major point of control over me. I wasn’t allowed to touch it. I was told in so many words that my body didn’t belong to me anymore. (When had it ever?) The odd time I couldn’t stand it anymore and I shaved it off, they were so aghast and disgusted. I looked like an alien, a child, a girl. I wasn’t to just do that to them without telling them. What would people say?

Anyway, without going back down that well again, this is the next thing I need to wrangle. And in practical terms it’s… like, theoretically it should be simple and straightforward. All it takes is money, which I don’t have but I can maybe figure out. But again also: pandemic.

One of the places around here, they had some kind of a deal where you paid a flat fee for forever treatment—however long it took to get rid of everything, which I know can take several visits —and could pay that in small installments. Something like $40 a month. Which, y’know. That’s… not terrible. It’s a thing I could maybe figure out how to manage. Except, it’s plague outside. Even worse, it’s plague inside, particularly with self-care facilities where people will linger. And technically this is not vital, time-sensitive treatment. So that’s a barrier.

I’ve held out for 30 years, so I guess I can wait a few more months and see if we can fix the problem every other fucking corner of the world has figured out. (Ha ha, have I even met America?) But I don’t want to. And for once, that matters. I never let it. But this time it does.

I matter.

So. This is a priority. We’ll figure it out. Somehow.