When I started getting interested in makeup
When I started secondary school I was allowed to wear nail polish and I typically a wore glitter or a different shade of purple or blue on each finger. At about 13 years old I began wearing Rimmel white or silver eye shadow to make my eyes stand out behind my glasses. I also wore Collection 2000 (as it was known back then) black mascara and clear or pink lip gloss. After watching renowned make up artist Kevyn Aucoin on the Ricki Lake show I went out and bought his book Making Faces, where he used make up to transform celebrities into looking like other celebrities. Some of them were incredible. I also used to tear out the pages from Bliss and Sugar! magazines for make up inspiration.
I discovered eyeliner when I went to university. I used Bourjois liquid eyeliner in black and while it's not the easiest eyeliner to start off with I found it much easier to use than pencil liner. I didn't start wearing foundation until I was 20 years old. The reason I hadn't worn foundation before was that the high street in the '90's only offered pink toned foundations and I have a yellow toned tan complexion. (They still lean this way despite the multi cultural makeup of the UK.) My first foundation was from Clinique because they had more inclusive shades and I had a bit more money to spend than I did in my teenage years. I later found the shades ran too terracotta instead of yellow and I'm still trying to find my Holy Grail foundation (Shu Uemura and Estee Lauder have been the best matches so far.) After foundation my first high end product I bought for myself were Lancome's Juicy Tubes as they were really popular at the time. After I left university I wore makeup to look presentable for work.
Feeling Ill
In my late 20's I knew there was something physically wrong with me health-wise but I didn't know what it was. I caught the flu but while the rest of the symptoms disappeared I still had this unrelenting, extreme tiredness every day. I would get jelly legs and collapse while washing up the dishes on a Friday or Sunday night. If I got less than 11 hours sleep I would be unable to walk from the top of the bed to the bottom of the bed without collapsing. Some days I could barely talk. It was making me depressed because I had barely any energy to carry on with my usual routines and duties in my life. So I began to start wearing thicker foundation and used make up as a mask to cover how unhappy I was and to make sure that people wouldn't notice I was unhappy or ill. It sounds a bit illogical but I was a teacher and your job involves putting up a front or a performance in the classroom and the make up was part of my costume.
M.E. often starts with someone having the flu, stomach flu, glandular fever (mono.) or shingles. Then some of the symptoms go way but you don't recover or bounce back to normal and the debilitating tiredness remains leaving you only able to function at a much lower level. This can be 50% or less than normal. Think about your own life, operating at 50% means you will have to turn down nights at the pubs, cinema trips, visiting family, going to church, holidays, cleaning the house, not showering as much as you like in order to keep your job or your family together. To survive from one day to the next you may just have to do the minimum or what you are able to do so you don't collapse and becoming bed bound or suffer pain from too much stimulation (light, noise, smells.) M.E. can result in years of being housebound or bedbound rather than just 'lockdowns' which have an end date.
The current pandemic has seen the rise of 'Long Covid' or Long haulers, where people don't fully recover from the Covid 19 virus. They share some of the same symptoms of M.E. notably the extreme physical and mental fatigue, memory problems and 'brain fog' where it is difficult to understand or engage in a conversation, read or follow a TV show. The UK government has donated £18.5 million to fund 4 studies of long COVID in the hope to understand and develop treatment that may have implications for M.E. treatments as well.
Anyway a year later when I was physically able to do a few more things, I made a New Year's resolution to start wearing make up again. I wasn't working and didn't have a boyfriend, the make up was for me. I felt well enough to start concentrating on grooming again. It was also to recapture some of the old me. I went out and bought some lightweight make up brushes. Then I started playing around with makeup, copying looks from magazines, working it out as there weren't any guides or listed products beside the pictures. Around 2009-2010, UK makeup artist Lauren Luke became a big sensation on Youtube and and I began watching her videos.
I was still housebound and so any visitors to the house was a big event and excuse to wear makeup! When I saw people they would say that 'you don't look ill' because I was wearing makeup. I still wore it because I felt so drained and shit all the time I didn't want to have to look shit as well. Anyway I really got into watching Youtube make up tutorials. I loved Tiffany D she is a true artist and amazingly talented but unfortunately doesn't do tutorials or much makeup content these days. I learnt the most from Sineady Cady (The Makeup Chair) as her tutorials were really easy to follow. I also watched Wayne Goss who seemed honest and succinct. I liked a lot of his makeup hacks and techniques especially his contouring video here.
One of my symptoms of having M.E. / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome was forgetting how to spell. It was like that type information had gone missing from my memory. Somehow I found the beauty review site MakeupAlley. I started writing reviews on make up products I had used and I found my spelling was improving. Then I thought why not have all my reviews together in a blog? I loved writing and also hoped to help people through giving honest reviews and find other people who were also into makeup as much as I was. I didn't have any sisters to talk to and my mum wasn't into make up. She thought my interest in make up was frivolous but for me it was an escape. While blogging I've also picked up other skills such as styling photographs, using social media and a bit of HTML.
I was still housebound and so any visitors to the house was a big event and excuse to wear makeup! When I saw people they would say that 'you don't look ill' because I was wearing makeup. I still wore it because I felt so drained and shit all the time I didn't want to have to look shit as well. Anyway I really got into watching Youtube make up tutorials. I loved Tiffany D she is a true artist and amazingly talented but unfortunately doesn't do tutorials or much makeup content these days. I learnt the most from Sineady Cady (The Makeup Chair) as her tutorials were really easy to follow. I also watched Wayne Goss who seemed honest and succinct. I liked a lot of his makeup hacks and techniques especially his contouring video here.
Why I started this blog.
Why I wear Make up
Makeup is something I wear for me, to look presentable and feel special and I would put it on to meet up with friends. However since the pandemic I haven't been wearing much makeup but writing this reminds me of how much I love it and going to make an effort to keep up my morale (and I have a lot of mascaras in my stash to test!) I must stress that my reasons for wearing makeup have been my own personal experience, others with M.E /CFS have their own reasons for wearing make up.
While I haven't recovered from M.E. I credit The Lightening Process for improving my quality of life. The best way of explaining it is NLP and self hypnosis. You use previous memories of a healthy you to remind your body how it used to function when it was well. You reunite the body and mind. It helped me to break the boom bust cycle where you do a lot on your good days as you finally have some energy and then payback happens where you end being bed bound for the rest of the week. The lightening process gave me energy to be spontaneous, I'm no longer housebound, I can walk further and generally seem to be improving.
 |
| Although this diagram is for Dysautonomia it applies to most chronic illnesses |
The advice I would give to anyone suffering from fatigue is to write down your daily activities and categorise them as low or high energy. So changing my bed, walking to the post box, having a shower, or phoning the bank require a lot of energy. Reading a book or writing a blog post are low energy tasks for me. It will be different for lots of people. Plan a daily schedule where you make sure high energy tasks are spread out with lower energy tasks in-between. There's also pacing which you kind of learn anyway which means you 'rest' (don't sleep or watch TV or read because they are activities not a proper rest) or mediate and cut back on activities you have to do. If you used to do a three hour clean and tidy blitz, you now need to divide the tasks into bite sizes and breaks across the day (s). Otherwise you may push yourself too far and be unable to do anything for days after. Maybe you used to jam pack your schedule or were always late because you underestimated how much time you had. Now you need to overestimate how long activities take and add buffer zones of rest in-between. These rest breaks can be 15 minutes, a few hours or day in-between. You may need to delegate household chores or work part time or have to stay home and rest. I only do one thing a day so if I have to go to a hospital appointment that will be the only thing I do that day. I will rest and sleep afterwards. And the following day will be resting indoors as well
If someone tells you that they can't meet up tomorrow because they had a bath yesterday- BELIEVE THEM as preposterous as it seems because if you have M.E. you only have so much energy to live on for the week because sleep and food don't seem to top up your energy enough to function fully. The spoons theory explains living with chronic illness well. This pandemic has meant that many people have experienced the loneliness of isolation that many with chronic illness live with. So please post covid, remember to include and check up on your friend or family member who happens to have a chronic illness. If anyone has lost someone directly or indirectly to covid my heart goes out to you.
If anyone wants to know more about having Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/M.E. tweet me or send me an Instagram DM. For more information or to make a donation contact ME Association or Action for ME (U.K)
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete