It has been a while since I have written a beauty sleep journal entry. A few days ago I wrote a post to share about my Juverest sleep wrinkle pillow purchase. I haven’t received the pillow yet. I anticipate that I will have it by Friday based on the FedEx tracking information. In the aforementioned post, I admitted that I have not been having much luck conquering my insomnia since I last wrote a beauty sleep journal update. So that means I have been failing in my quest to start harnessing the power of sleep. In fact, I hadn’t really even been bothering for a while. I’ve only just recently resumed the effort because my face has been looking really bad. I mean really bad. I’ve been trying not to be embarrassed and upset about it, but it’s hard to look at myself sometimes. It’s painful. It shouldn’t be though, because having an unattractive face isn’t an illness. It shouldn’t cause suffering. But if you’ve read any of the beauty related articles that I’ve posted, then you know that I have had self image issues since I was a young girl. And my case of it was/is pretty severe. I am working on it every day because I strongly believe that we should not love ourselves more or less depending on how our face looks. But it’s hard not to love yourself more or less depending on how your face looks when all you’ve experienced throughout your life is people being interested in you more when you paint up your face to make it look more attractive, and not being interested in you at all when you’re wearing your natural face. So when your natural face starts to make you look like a broken down and beaten hard drinking old woman, accepting what you see when you look in the mirror isn’t exactly easy.
As far as sleeping goes, I am still struggling like heck. Last night was particularly crazy. There was a smell in the bedroom that kept penetrating my sleep and waking me up until I eventually had to get up and go out to sleep on the couch. But even while sleeping on the couch I could still smell the odor faintly. Turns out it was something I’ve been using on my skin. So I doubt I managed to accumulate 6 hours of sleep at the end of all the tossing and turning and waking up. I’m on a pretty long stretch of not getting much sleep. I thought I had managed to reach about 8 hours the other day, but the bags under my eyes were still as huge as ever when I woke up, and they didn’t respond to any attempt to minimize them. It’s insane. I have never needed to care about my looks more than now. But it seems that at least as far as my looks are concerned, I waited until to late to find the courage to go and pursue singing and songwriting. I think last year was the year. I looked and felt the best ever in my life for most of last year. Even though I still had to be battling a lot of the things I’m battling now, and I certainly didn’t look as fresh faced and supple as when I was in my twenties, I still looked pretty good. On my worse days I was still looking ten years older, but on my best days I was looking at least 10 years younger. Not that it’s important to look younger. I am trying to re-program myself so that I reject the idea that looking younger than my age is something to aspire to and take pride in. I want to be okay with looking my age. But I don’t want to look ten years older in a bad way. It means things are not balanced in my life. I’ve even begun to notice things happening to my neck that you expect to happen in your seventies. Nowadays these things aren’t happening to women in their fifties and sixties even, and here I am with a few years to go before turning fifty and I am dealing with this? It’s just not okay man.
So yeah, I am hoping the JuveRest pillow is going to help me improve the quality of my sleep and help me get a few more hours than I’ve been getting. Too much to expect out of a pillow? Probably. And especially considering the makers aren’t claiming the pillow will improve quality of sleep. They’re really just claiming the pillow will help in the fight against pre-mature wrinkling that is linked to how you sleep. I’m hoping that my experiments last year when I first started this blog were not just my imagination. I did find that I was looking better when I was trying to sleep on my back. Those nights when I managed to get most of the hours of sleep lying on my back, I thought I woke up the following mornings looking more rested and with less sagging of my face around my cheek areas. That’s the particular headache for me right now. I can live with the bags under my eyes, but when you combine giant bags under your eyes with pronounced nasolabial folds, it’s just not a good look. But it might be the case that I won’t be able to do anything about it unless I’m willing to get surgery. I don’t know. I will give the back sleeping thing one more shot with the JuveRest pillow. And I will up the ante on my skin care regimen. Why should I accept to look older than my almost seventy-year old mother? All of my siblings, including ones older than I am look decades younger than their age. What’s up with this BS that I should look like I need someone to tie a leash around my neck and walk me? This is not cool. It’s not a look that can work for a singer-songwriter who isn’t actually seventy years old.
(Note: This was originally published on bestbeautypillow.com which has now been moved to avenuesixty.com)