To the left, you can see one of the benefits of not paying rent. Usually, when I get an email from JCrew or Stila or anything retail, I immediately delete it to avoid the test of willpower that is sure to follow once I gaze upon items I cannot afford to buy.  But when I was offered $100 worth of makeup for $38, I figured that my landlord’s loss was my gain, and I snatched that deal up.  Along with a few other items from stores around the city.  I literally had not been shopping–not even stepped foot inside a store–for months.  Maybe, probably, since the last time my mom and her wallet visited.  But fall means newness, and it also means cardigans, leggings, and gold eyeshadow, at least this year.

Makeup makes girls so happy.  When I got home from work and saw that box waiting for me, I literally shrieked. And back when I could afford a subscription to InStyle and saw that waiting in my mailbox, my heart would do a little jump and I would make an afternoon out of working my way through the pages of clothes and products.  All these ways of decorating ourselves make us so giddy.  Cut to a few weeks ago, when I went clothes shopping with the BF (for the BF) and watched as he methodically checked items off a list, not once squealing or jumping up and down.  What?!

We women are taught early how to apply powder and jewelry in an attempt to accentuate beauty, or create it.  We have products that cover blemishes, redden cheeks, shine up lids, darken lashes, conceal shadows.  We get up early to tediously apply these masks while men roll out of bed, stand under some water, roll on a little deodorant, and are ready for their day.  They walk out the door and through their lives uncovered (not all of them–this post must seem strangely irrelevant to my gay friends); we can’t imagine stepping foot outside without altering ourselves.

Boys and girls are different.

And yet we all have to learn vulnerability.  Few of us are born comfortably practicing it.  Guys arrive into a relationship and are introduced to such terms as talk and share and communicate.  Girls arrive into a relationship and learn how to do all of the above…truthfully.  Without hiding behind drama or manipulation or, eventually, makeup.  And the only way any of us can succeed at any of the above is when we realize that the person across from us, though they may be The One, is not THE ONE. Not the One who gives us ultimate worth.  I found this out by looking everywhere but the right place for mine.  And after all that mess, after the mask was off and I was standing in front of the mirror like Carrie Bradshaw in Mexico and girl looked rough–then I realized I was not and never had been truly alone.  Like Quince in Meet Joe Black, a movie that creates a rare disagreement among my sister and me (I love it; she hates it because she says it takes three hours to meet Joe Black and by the end she feels like she doesn’t know him at all).  Anyway, Quince tells Joe that he is certain his wife loves him because she knows the worst thing about Quince and is still there.  Still there.  I have a few people who are still there, but only one who was there while it all happened.  Having nothing to hide, or hide behind, really makes my heart jump.