September 9, 2026
My “Buy Yourself the F**king Lilies” book has a chapter on creating a ritual of “getting ready”. I read it this evening while I was out on my balcony drinking my afternoon cup of tea like I’m the Queen of Fucking England, rewarding myself for being an absolute baller-shot-caller at work. 900 more days like today, and I might make up for the piece of shit I have been over the last month or so. I guess it’s good that I’m chipping away at the deficit. Anyway, the chapter was about how the author started living with another woman in LA, and quickly noticed that her roommate spent a ton of energy (and money) on her beauty rituals. And the roommate did a lot of these activities (getting her nails done, blow outs, makeup shopping) with her mom, which drummed up some feelings for the author on how her own mother never taught her how to “get ready”. So she created some rituals of her own to make getting ready in the morning feel like a special start to the day. Inspired by Cleopatra of all people, which would not have been my first choice, partly because…like, how good do we really think Cleopatra was with hygiene? I’m sure she was leaps and bounds above everyone else in her day-and-age, but probably still not great. As far as I know, they didn’t have Clinical Strength Secret deodorant or Kopari body spray back then.
I was excited to read this chapter because I already do all the shit she is prescribing in it. I’m healed! I’ve done it! JK, but this spring when I was going through “big heartbreak #1” of 2026 (which now seems like it was a warm-up compared to this summer), my coping mechanism was makeup. I went to a fancy gala in DC, and spent weeks planning my makeup routine. I went to Ulta about a half dozen times to get supplies and started binge watching episodes of “Beautiful and Bothered” on YouTube. After a ton of trial and error, I built a makeup and skin prep routine that seems to deliver good results. And I learned something about myself: If I’m wearing expensive makeup, I won’t cry. In fact, crying while wearing makeup from these brands like Dior or Charlotte Tilbury feels like a felony offense. If I got up for work and wanted to make sure I wouldn’t find myself crying in the bathroom at noon, I would sit down, turn on some music, and fix my fucking face. Crying is fair game if you’re wearing Covergirl or Milani or some of the other drugstore brands, but if I had to make a special trip to Ulta (or, dare I say, Sephora?!) to get the product, the name of the game is “thou shall not squander.” At 8 dollars an ounce, we can’t be touching that shit up in the car after a meltdown.
I’ve added a few things to my morning ritual this week, ya know, to deal with that pesky depression. Here’s what my morning looked like today:
- Wake up at 6 am, take meds, throw on a robe and head downstairs to the kitchen.
- Turn on the tea kettle, and the laptop (in that order).
- Start writing “Morning Pages”, which is just a journal of random Rebecca thoughts.
- Grab tea cup, brew Raspberry tea with little strands of saffron in it.
- Finish morning pages with tea in hand. Try not to burn mouth.
- Go back upstairs, brush teeth, take a hot bath.
- Turn on music. Currently hooked on a self curated playlist I call “Grati-toad”.
- Get dressed.
- Deal with the hair. Dry it, curl it, bop it, twist it, pull it, brush it, spray it.
- FIX MY FUCKING FACE:
- Skin prep with toner, hyaluronic acid, lotion.
- Primer. The kind for old ladies to smooth wrinkles.
- Foundation. Dior. Expensive as hell.
- Concealer under the eyes and over my glorious new acne scars. Nars. Also expensive.
- Liquid blush and contour if I’m feeling freaky.
- Setting powder. The expensive shit from Hourglass.
- Powder blush.
- Eye brow tint.
- Eye shadow. The more sparkly, the better.
- Mascara. The tubing kind that comes off in warm water.
- Lips. Lipstick? Gloss? Plumping gloss? The world is my oyster. The pinker, the better.
- Setting spray. The kind from Loreal that looks and feels like a tiny bottle of hairspray. In fact, I think it is hairspray. Inexpensive, probably carcinogenic.
- Apply perfume. Pink Kopari.
- Choose and insert earrings. Mutter about how “spicy” some of my newer piercings are.
- UNPLUG THE GODDAMN CURLING IRON.
- Check one more time to make sure I unplugged the curling iron.
- Grab belongings, go downstairs and enjoy a morning walk with puppy.
- Feed puppy.
- Get in the car.
That whole routine takes about 2 hours. 2 hours to get ready for the day seems absurd, especially for someone who has been known to make it out the door in 15 minutes if I don’t need to look particularly nice for work. But taking time for myself has been the magic potion for me lately. Two weeks ago, I was absolutely purging my emotions, or at least trying to. If you ever watched New Girl, you might remember the episode where Coach gets dumped and is crying in a bathtub while on the phone with his ex shouting “Malia, I’m in pain and I want you to know!! I’VE GOT TO GET THIS PAIN OUT OF MY BODY!” Then he sticks his fingers down his throat in an attempt to literally purge his pain. That was me, trying to forcefully evict all this hurt. Trying to speed up some process of getting better because it was an inconvenience to me to be sad. I can’t be crying and feeling things when this makeup is so damn expensive. Get out of my body, pain!
I tried numbing the pain with alcohol and sleep aids. I tried crying. I tried lighting candles and saying prayers and rubbing crystals and then felt more pain when “the universe ignored me”. I tried sleeping it away. I tried shouting about it to my friends, which just annoyed and exhausted them. I tried sitting in the shower for hours to wash it away. I tried to distract from it with tv and shopping and cleaning every inch of this house. I tried to bully it out of myself by calling myself atrocious names and telling myself I deserve it.
Unfortunately none of that works – it was never going to work. My logical brain knows that the only way to deal with pain is to feel it and then allow enough time to pass for it to dull. But my hands still went down my throat (figuratively speaking) to purge that pain from my body – in the most unhealthy ways. To the point where I dug myself so much deeper in a hole that I worried I’d never find my way out.
So yeah, 2 hours is a long time to get ready to leave the house in the morning, especially when I’m sleepy and would like to hit the snooze. But there are about 1.5 hours in that routine above where I am allowed to cry and feel. I can (and do) while writing my morning pages. I can cry in the tub, I can think about people who hurt me while I blow dry and curl my hair. I can ruminate while sipping my tea. But at the end of the routine, my expensive-ass makeup comes out, and the tears and pain have to be carefully placed back into the box where they belong. I wrap them gently in tissue paper, tie up the box in ribbon, and put them away to be felt another time. That’s the rule. The Dior comes out of my vanity drawer, and the pain goes back into the box. I can’t throw it out with my garbage. Life would be a lot easier if I could purge it like that. But I can manage it and tend to it, and put it away for another time.
Cluelessness is the Mother of Invention 