Vanity, Thy name is Woman :).

Well, the actual quote by Shakespeare is "Frailty, Thy name is woman" (in Hamlet), but Vanity has taken over even the quote in common usage :-D. I have always put my absolute faith in the common usage quote :-D, mainly because I have no illusions about myself. I mean we women dedicate ourselves to threading eyebrows, waxing arms and legs most of the times, or in general torturing ourselves all in the name of our vanity :-D. Jerry Seinfeld says it best :-D.

I will never understand how a woman can take boiling hot wax, pour it on her upper thighs, rip the hair out by the roots, and still be afraid of a spider - Jerry Seinfeld.

I love Jerry and this is my most favourite quote of them all (I'm not afraid of spiders or anything that crawls btw :-D) :). But I never thought how our vanities matter in our day-to-day lives until the incident (is that ominous enough? :-D).

I wanted to write this post on July 10th commemorating the 5th month anniversary of my fainting incident. But well, I am writing it now :-p. As you read then, I had/have a sense of humour about it, as long as I was at home and not facing any crowds. As soon as I had to get out of the house, the anxiety would start. I had a blatant scar on my forehead and a very noticeable lump and scar above my upper lip. So I would obsess that everyone would notice it (I know I'm not queen Cleopatra, to turn everyone's heads, hehehee, but sometimes my imagination runs wild :-D). I would wonder what anyone might think about it. In fact, things were so bad the first month that I hardly ever got out of home.




This is the only photo I have of me during that first month. It was taken on Sri's birthday, i.e 18 days after the incident. Atleast it was winter then, so whenever I did go out, I wore a wintercap which covered my forehead (I couldn't do anything for the scar above my upper lip). I have photos of Sri and me hung over the walls and sometimes, I wouldn't even be able to look at them without feeling sad and angry. I wouldn't accept invites from any acquaintances we have here, because I didn't want to narrate the entire story to them..

Sri was completely supportive and my parents were literally trying to knock some sense into me. Mom would recount stories of worse accidents (women who lost their teeth in accident and had major surgeries) and somehow though I understood everything, I simply couldn't help it. Dad was like, people have their own concerns and why would they be concerned with you. It'd always make me laugh, but again I would regress. Maybe it was some form of depression. I mean I have had accidents before, but having something on your face is different from anything else. To this day I don't know why.

I would apply vitamin E oil to it twice or thrice a day plus some other ayurvedic ointment at night (kumkumadi thaila) - both are supposed to help with scars. Slowly things started changing, but not because the scars started fading or anything like that. But because I would make myself go out - thats when I started taking Snugli to the library. I used to apply a thin coat of make-up to hide the scars, but if you stared right at my face, the scars would still be visible (I used to joke to my close friends that I have never applied make-up all my life and now I am becoming an expert at it :-D). And I got back to swimming, making it a point not to apply makeup for that :-D. I did catch up with people I knew when I went swimming, I'd see some questions in their eyes, but they were too polite to ask about it :). About 2 months later, I'd even go to the park nearby without make-up.

Today, 5 months later I still apply some compact powder before I go out, but thats about it. The scars have faded a lot, but the areas are still a tiny bit sore. There was a lump on the area above my upper lip which was pretty bad and which I worried about, now the soreness is gone and the size of the lump has reduced a lot. The scar there is hardly visible (unless you look at it too closely). The forehead scar is a horizontal 'Y' and it is visible. But the main thing is they are not on my mind all the time as it was then. I don't bother about them at all now. Guess I just needed time..




I took this photo today (no makeup whatsoever :-D, the thing on my chin is a pimple :-p - vanity strikes again :-D). On a side note, this was another photography experiment - getting the feel of portraits by taking self-portraits first :).

As I said, I still don't know why I was so bothered about it. Maybe I was afraid that people judged me by looks and hence would not even try to get to know me, the person inside. Or maybe I am shallow when it comes to certain things. Or maybe I felt like I lost a part of me forever. Or maybe I was just insecure and wondering whether people who loved me would continue to love me despite this (meaning I was being an idiot :-D). Well, I have been proved wrong in many of these already and as I said sometime back, I am me no matter what happens :). Like Aamir says in Dil Chahtha hai, "Perfection cannot be improved", hehehehee :)).