When I was shooting this TV show, the bags under my eyes were very, well, baggy. And not like the sultry “that girl likes to party” nineties model type of smoky eye. No, it was more like the kind of eye bags that cause people to ask you if you’re okay while looking very concerned. Pretty much every conversation started with “You seem tired” or “Rough night?” No matter how many cold compresses I put on my eyes or how many products my makeup artist put on them, I looked like a hungover panda.
I got through the insecurity by rationalizing that maybe it could be good for girls to see an example of someone in the media who isn’t perfect. Someone who’s human, who has a real face with real flaws and real eye bags. Maybe this was how I could be a role model. Maybe this was how I could try and crack the Beauty Myth that Naomi Wolf was talking about. I wished I had grown up with more realistic depictions of people on television, so maybe this was a gift and how I could actually contribute to a realistic physical standard. Creatively it made sense, too, given the symbolism of a character who has so much emotional baggage would also have, well, under-eye baggage.
One night I had people over to watch the show’s live feed. I braced for having to see myself on-screen, which is always a complicated feeling. I’m grateful for what I get to do for a living, but I also think it’s unhealthy to look at yourself as much as we all do these days. I have a completely unscientifically researched theory that humans aren’t designed to look at ourselves as much as we do. From what I gather, there are no naturally occurring mirrors in nature. And no, ponds and ice don’t count, you hater.
The show started. Another reason it is not enjoyable to watch shows that I’m in is that so much of making television is about running out of time and settling for something that’s never as good as you want it to be, so I end up obsessing over all the improvements there was no time to make. I just drive myself crazy thinking of all the better jokes that I wish I’d had time to put in, or other choices I wish I’d made as a performer. As I braced to self-flagellate, I appeared on-screen, and the negative thoughts didn’t come because my brain was too frozen in shock from at what I saw: me . . . but with no eye bags. I’d never seen myself without eye bags before. Most fetuses develop in amniotic sacs, I swear I developed in an under-eye bag.
I had dealt with eye bags all my life, so I assumed this was the result of some weird transmogrification of what happens when humans are made into pixels and reflected back to you with some electronic magic I’ll never understand. But how could the camera add ten pounds yet subtract eye bags? Was I going crazy? Had the bags ever even been there in the first place? Had I become an insane dysmorphic actress who amplified her every flaw? Was everyone around me enabling my batshit crazy behavior? Or worse, was everyone around me tricking me, trying to make me think that I had flaws that I didn’t have to slowly hack away at my self-esteem until I turned into a less charming iteration of Joan Crawford?
The good news and the bad news is that I later found out that the reason I looked so tired in person yet so rested on TV was because someone had been hired to “clean up” my face in post-production. The bags were so distracting that they were digitally removed. My reaction to this news was, and still is, complicated. I was relieved because I was pretty sick of getting attacked so much online for looking “tired” and “busted,” but I was also sad. I thought about the girls in the Middle East and what they said about women in America and their appearance. I wondered if Photoshop and digital retouching could be America’s version of women in the Middle East who choose to wear the hijab. Women in America may not cover our faces with scarves, but sometimes we choose or feel pressure to cover it with perfecting veils, be it an airbrush app or the most flattering Instagram filter.
Another thing connected to my experience in the Middle East was that once the show aired, people started recognizing me. I’m not trying to get sympathy because I’m probably the least famous “famous” person, but it took a minute for me to adjust to it all, so going out in public became weird and awkward. People would come up to me and give me jarring backhanded compliments like “You look so much prettier in person!” or “Don’t listen to them, you’re great!” I started wondering who this “them” was, and why they were so mad at me. I got obsessed with the idea that this amorphous “they” behaved one way to my face and another way behind my back. This awakened and fortified an old belief system I had that everyone is duplicitous and that you can’t ever be truly safe with anyone. Like plaid schoolgirl skirts on adults, this was something that made sense in the nineties, and only in the nineties.
What does this have to do with the Middle East? Well, I got so paranoid and skittish that I found myself doing the very thing I had judged and resented years before in Dubai: When I left the house, I wrapped my head with a scarf. I obviously did it for a very different reason than Middle Eastern women do and it wasn’t an official hijab per se, but there I was, voluntarily covering my head and face. I did it to avoid being recognized, being accidentally insulted, and getting confusing career feedback from strangers, e.g. “You’re like the female Rodney Dangerfield!” I needed a way to avoid being in a situation where people came up to me and asked “Are you really the age you say you are?” and “Don’t listen to the haters! They’re just jealous!” in a grocery store parking lot.
People looked at me like I was slightly crazy for wearing a headscarf in 90-degree L.A. weather, but it actually worked because I stopped getting my feelings hurt in the frozen foods section. The headscarf gave me anonymity and safety, which was the only way I could protect my already fragile self-esteem. I finally understood what those girls may have been trying to tell me all those years ago. The experience had come full circle, and the symbol of oppression I felt so insulted by having to wear in the mosque I was now ordering in bulk on Amazon.