I’m stunned. Shocked. I want to put the words back, rewind, but I know it’s impossible. This is not a VHS tape, this is not a sitcom. This is here, now, this is life. I’ve never actually been in a car accident, thank god, but I’ve seen enough movies where someone is flying through the window to get the gist. That’s what I feel like. I’m being thrust, chest forward, out of the front seat, surrounded by the twinkling of a million billion shards of glass, slowly delicately ripping at my flesh as I fly through them in slow motion, somersaulting through the air, almost as if I’m flying.
This is when I lose my face.
So let me relay the context as speedily as possible. I lost my face at 28, but it all began when I was 21.
I meet a straggle-haired musician with the appropriate holes in his jeans and Chelsea boots, about a year or less after arriving in London. We promptly fall in love. He steals packets of noodles from parcels that arrive for the sweatshop he lives beneath. He and his roommate haven’t paid rent in months. I mother him, as is my instinct to do, feed him and get him out of there. After a near-death adventure in Morocco and Spain, we end up in Berlin for a year, then land back in London for the remainder of our seven-year relationship, which looks a bit like this:
We have two rabbits, Emily and Lucy, who live where the refrigerator should be and beat each other up in the night. I am attempting to be a stylist and art director while holding down many jobs, while he makes music at home and gets fired anytime he actually gets a job. He sobs, on occasion, wanting to quit making music. I encourage him to keep it up. We are a team. I pour all my energy into his success.
After years of creative-directing shoots and fashion videos (let me specify, I do almost everything but click the button), I notice I am still getting none of the credit. My then-boyfriend encourages me to get a camera, and start taking ownership of my own ideas. And so I do. One of these projects turns out to be a music video for him. We make it with about £50, a tiny studio, a shopping trolley and a spotlight. This video lands him a $500,000 record deal with Island Records. He is only 23. Things change almost overnight. He wants me to grow my hair, to pronounce my T’s, and dress demurely. I do everything to please him, to no avail. It’s like, and I reflect on this in retrospect, he can’t stand the sight of me. I remind him of who he used to be.
I become what they call a doormat. I am shaky and afraid of displeasing him. He is cruel to me in front of other people, I am introduced as his girlfriend – I have no name. Fast forward about a year and a half; I am now 27. He wants to break up. We do. I am devastated. About six months later, he is married to another musician he’d met in America, and he cuts me off and disappears from my life. The final time he gets in contact, he tries to get me to give him back the Rimowa suitcase he bought me.
Now, of course, there’s pages of clickbait literature on the subject – “The loss of your identity after a narcissistic relationship” “Who Am I? Surviving narcissism,” so on and so forth – but alas, back in early internet days, it just wasn’t out there. So all those years ago, I began restoring my sense of self, one layer at a time, through debauched nights and, perhaps, my work.
Then I moved to Paris in an attempt to make a new life for myself.
A really nice dude lets me stay with him. I mean, it is really nice of him. I’m definitely not judging a guy in his late 20s for still living at home in his parents’ house, having a small room, with a single bed, at his age. I mean, maybe I would perhaps judge him a tiny bit, but I can’t not accept the fact that he has one up on me – I don’t even have a bed, let alone a room, and I sleep on a bit of flaccid plastic I am too lazy to pump up. I become obsessed with Sartre’s line “Hell is other people.” Which I misquote as, “Hell is in the eyes of others.” Sartre said in Being and Nothingness, “By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other.” I wonder: when did we start creating these masks, nudged into mirroring others’ perceptions of ourselves?
Perhaps mine began at the pubescent age of 12, when I had begun to obsess over whether or not I was attractive to boys, namely Bart, my school crush.
The concern is promptly shut down when Bart and his friends come up to me one lunch and say, “Ewwww, you have a mustache!” I am mortified, to say the least, and up until recently it has been a “thing.” Another boy comes to me afterward and whispers that he thinks I am pretty. He saves me that day.

Years later – OK, more like two years ago – this boy, now man, resurfaces online to confess that he’s been in love with me for his entire life. Sweet, right? Wrong. What starts as a cringingly earnest declaration quickly spirals into a chaotic tornado of stalker-ish obsession and unhinged rage – the kind of conversation that makes you Google “how to fake your own death” while hitting the Block button.
Could that be my ground zero?
Or maybe it was just my relationship with my ex, where he insisted I transform into some kind of upper-crust lady – all fine dining, poodles and pearls. I could practically hear him narrating my makeover: “Darling, you simply must wear this persona – it’s all the rage!” But every time I tried to don the mask, it slipped off, along with fragments of my real self.

It might be a relief to some people who have befallen similar destinies, that karma caught up with my ex. He and his wife were fired off a major reality show in epic fashion, then their apartment burned down. For me, in more recent years, I’ve been grappling with the awkward, unexpected bodily changes no one sets you up for or discusses – nipple hairs, white eyebrows (!?), white pubes (what the actual fuck!), not to mention the relentless pull of gravity, loosening jowls and arm flab that have really made me battle with my own sense of beauty. And this is the crazy thing: Like some kind of fucked-up, twisted mind game, I’m always able to look at a photo of myself from before – let’s say a year before – and really see myself, how I looked, who I was, even in a kind of approving way. But at the time – still to this day – I can’t recognize myself at the time of taking.

The biggest question for me has to be this: was the stripping of my mask really some kind of gift? In some kind of twisted way, was I set free? When my ex and I broke up, I had a thought: “What if I put the same energy into myself, as I put into him?” And that’s when my career really takes off. Perhaps I use my work to reflect back my sense of self in the world. My work becomes less about what others want and more like a messy, ongoing experiment – a chaotic lab where I’m testing out bits of myself. Each project brings me closer to some wonky, ever-evolving version of me – not perfect, but at least it’s mine.

Most recently, I directed a body horror called Grafted. It’s all about one girl’s obsession with having the right face. After finishing the movie, I find myself staring at the vast blankness of “what next?” It’s not writer’s block exactly, but a kind of creative identity crisis – an unsettling, awkward dance with my own shadow. Do I dive into something raw and confessional or take a sharp left turn into absurd comedy? In a world so increasingly ruled by the Algorithm – a constant gigantic mirroring system – it seems like the most interesting, important thing we can do is be as truly authentic. Actually, scrap that word. The work we make should be vulnerable, embarrassed, ashamed and alive; as truthful as we can be – warts and all.
This is why the masks we wear matter – not because they hide us, but because they can become us. Sartre’s “Other” isn’t just in the eyes of a schoolyard crush or a cruel ex. It’s in the digital filters, the algorithms, the endless feedback loops telling us who to be. Stripping off those masks feels like rebellion, even if just for a moment.
After wrapping the filming of Grafted, my costume designer (also a good friend) encouraged me to try botox. I was hesitant at first, but I went all in. Flicking, picking, poking, prodding – laser hair removal, botox, fillers, vein zapping. No more moustache.
I went to see my mother – “You look fresh,” she unknowingly quipped. It must have worked. It was a weird contradiction of sorts; I was adhering to a desire for beauty standards I’d so starkly opposed in the film I’d just made. “But you have to try it once,” my friend had said. I succumbed. After all, I thought, “It’s only a mask.”
…
It’s hard to explain. Imagine staring intensely, eyes puckered up, while looking back at your reflection. You pull back to try and give yourself a wider view, as a spidey sense tingles up your spine, a feeling worse than any horror movie you have ever seen. It is like you are looking at a ghost – you can not recognize one inkling of the person standing before you. You lean in closer, eyes narrowing further into little slits. You study your nose, the lines around your mouth, your hairline, lips, and …
Nothing.
But maybe that doesn’t matter. It’s what’s underneath that counts.
Right?
