Some Assembly Required
The instruction manual doesn’t arrive at birth. There’s no point giving it to you when you’re an infant; you wouldn’t know what to do with it. You’d try to eat it, or drool on it. The instruction manual doesn’t arrive by mail or by owl, either. This isn’t Princeton or Hogwarts. When you’re on the cusp of puberty, it appears one inconspicuous morning at the end of your bed, the words SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED emblazoned across the cover. You open it and turn to the page with the note that says start here.
Begin with your hair. It’s supposed to be sleek and straight and glossy. If it’s straight, it’s not voluminous enough; it needs more body that only a curling iron can provide. If it’s sleek, it’s not grungy enough; add grit with a texturizer spray. Now fix the color. Yours is too dishwater, too dark, too warm for your skin tone, too cool for your skin tone. Use purple toner to banish the brass. Add caramel highlights for warmth. Make it lighter. Make it lighter. Make it lighter. Bleach it until your scalp bleeds, until your hair is the color of butter and the texture of toast and then drown it in oil to mimic virginal perfection.
Move to your face. Your skin is terrible. Follow a five-step routine to banish the acne. Face wash. Toner. Exfoliator. Benzoyl peroxide cream. Moisturizer. Replace the toner with a clay mask to absorb the excess oil. Swap the moisturizer for a face oil to restore the moisture you stripped. Add an AHA serum to tackle fine lines. They’re called fine for a reason; you can’t see them yet, but they’re coming. Exfoliate. Exfoliate. Exfoliate. Scrub until your skin is as soft as a baby’s ass.
But skincare isn’t enough; your face is still all wrong. First: self-tanner. Your skin is too pale; you’re not Emma Stone. If your skin is darker than Rihanna, you’re too dark; use a bleaching cream. Hide the under-eye circles with concealer. Slather on foundation to conceal your spots. Layer on blush, highlighter, eyeshadow. Now eyeliner, mascara, brow gel. Finish the look with a plumping gloss because your thin lips are unkissable. Spend thirty minutes applying everything but don’t look like you’re trying so hard. Blend it in. Blend it in. Blend it in. You want to look like an Instagram filter, not a botched Botox job.
Lower your gaze to your boobs, your stomach, your legs. Your proportions are wrong. It’s a thought that’s itched the back of your neck for several months now: I don’t look like Britney/Keira/Selena/Olivia. You don’t, but you can fix that. The formula is: small waist, big boobs, long legs, short feet, round ass, flat abs. You look like a boy in your A cup; wear a push-up bra with padding. You look like a slut in your DD cup; suffocate them with a sports bra. Wear high-waisted jeans that emphasize your ass, mini-skirts that graze your upper thighs, crop tops that show off the abs that will abandon you when you’re twenty-five. Feel like an imposter in all of this, that you’re not sexy enough, skinny enough, trendy enough to wear this because you’re not a lingerie model. Start exercising. Do barre to make your legs longer and leaner. Do Pilates for flatter abs. Use your parents’ Peloton. Drop a few pounds. Drop a few pounds. Drop a few pounds. Keep going until your BMI drops below 20, which you can then wear like a badge of pride.
Return to the top to finish assembly. Fill your brain with contradictory mantras about self-image, your own paradox of the flesh. Every body is beautiful, but there’s nothing more beautiful than a size two. You are enough as is, but a new pair of boots, a lengthening mascara, a pore refining face mask won’t hurt. The confidence you need is within you, but also in mascara and perfume and earrings. Ignore the trends and be true to yourself, even though your identity is now a composite of fashion tips, skincare advice, and hair tutorials. You dream in millennial pink, venturing on a hero’s journey battling frizz, shaping eyebrows, and defeating cellulite to unearth the secrets of Blake Lively’s hair and Kim Kardashian’s waist-to-hip ratio. Spend your twenties fossilizing these rules like a new house settling into its bones. With the appearance of your first crow’s feet and gray hair, consume collagen powder, apple cider vinegar pills, and biotin vitamins. Try everything, try everything, try everything. Your vanity drawers and medicine cabinet shelves runneth over with creams and serums and masks; with bronzers and mascaras and lipsticks.
Enter your thirties and look at what you’ve become. Attempt to destroy the instruction manual. Toss the masks, the serums, the creams. It’s a scam, anyway. Reduce your routine to a single moisturizer. In a week, repurchase the hair mask, the retinol serum, the eye cream. You aren’t ready to give up the fight against frizz and spots and wrinkles. Try again to unwrite the rules carved into your bones. Rebel and go makeup-free for a week, hair wild and free of product. Six men say you look tired; four women ask if you’re okay. When you look in the mirror, you see a face you don’t recognize and think, what kind of woman is this? Reassemble, reassemble, reassemble. Dig your concealer out of the trash. Add mascara and blush for good measure and when your neighbor compliments your glowing skin, you will smile and feel whole again.
Make peace with the instruction manual. You’ve nearly mastered the rules of the game. For every punishment for breaking a rule, a reward for following another. And when the next generation of girls falls into a deep sleep one night, toenails naked and cheeks pink with neglected acne, leave the instruction manual on their dresser with a note on the first page that says start here.
Melissa Darcey Hall
Melissa Darcey Hall is a writer and high school English teacher in San Diego, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fugue, The Coachella Review, Five South, The Florida Review, The Louisville Review, Columbia Journal, Pigeon Pages, Epiphany, and others.