What Does It Mean to Share Your Life but Hide Your Face?

Thoughts of an anonymous writer who bares her soul

Sharing my writing with other writers on this platform is the first time I have allowed myself to be judged solely by my work and not by my face.

Sure, you can see a tiny portion of my face in my profile. You can see the shape of my eyebrow, some eyelashes, a slice of my cheek.

But you have no idea about the straightness of my teeth, how tall I stand, or the length of my hair. You can’t see the way I scrunch up my brow when I’m thinking.

My writing identity is a vague black and white photo and a name inspired by my grandmother.

I chose to anonymize myself when I created my Medium account because I knew I wanted to be completely vulnerable here. I had stories floating in my head about my open marriage, sex, and deeply personal details of my life.

It felt freeing to write about sleeping with men other than my husband without worrying about personal judgment.

And there’s also the fact that I work in an elementary school. I don’t want to be one Google search away from giving all the hot dads at my school the wrong idea.

Of course, any writer who shares personal essays will start to share enough bits and pieces of themselves for readers to patch together their lives.

My essays reveal that I’m in a complicated marriage, that I have two very difficult children, and that my grandmother died in 2019. Readers may know that I once swam in an open-water ocean race, that I’ve traveled to the Balkans, and that I have a bum right hip that prevents me from running.

My attempts at humor might be more fictional, but sadly not too much. An Instagram algorithm did once try to push an adult-size Gorilla mask on me, and my children continue to reject ears of corn lacking uniformly yellow kernels. You better believe I have taken advantage of the free head massage my school nurse offers when she checks for lice.

I’m proud of all of these pieces of my life, and I have no problem sharing them here.

But a strange thought crossed my mind recently that made me pause.

As I was crafting a sentence about my aging body, I stopped and thought,

“They don’t know if I’m pretty or not.”

What if I had been churning out my personal stories on this platform, and all along readers had been thinking I was an unattractive woman?

What would that change about who I was to them?

Would they think less of me or find me more relatable this way?

In this moment of clarity, I realized that I’ve never not operated in the world without some extra confidence about my looks.

It’s not that I value looks over intelligence or humor or kindness. Far from it. I have worked hard my whole life at intellectual pursuits. I have degrees from three prestigious universities. I surround myself with brilliant friends who make me laugh.

But still, I have lived my whole life as a pretty person.

And at times, my looks have been my shield. They have made me feel that I could walk into a group of people and win at least one type of approval I didn’t have to work very hard for.

I’ve worried terribly about being smart enough, likable enough, or creative enough. But I’ve never worried that much about what others think of my looks.

And when you’re told you’re a pretty girl your whole life, it’s hard to shake that identity.

When I started posting my essays here, I no longer had that identity to hide behind. My words were my only offering.

I first found myself a tiny bit lost. I noticed things about myself I didn’t like, like the fact that male approval on my essays felt just a little different than female approval. Was seeking male approval so ingrained in me that I had reached for it even on an anonymous blog?

It felt strange attaching stock photo portraits to my pieces. It felt strange seeing another woman’s face attached to my own story. I worried about misrepresenting myself. Who was this woman with long flowing hair and a leather jacket staring off into the distance? Was she prettier, smarter, younger, more charming than I?

As I’ve written more, I’ve grown into this new anonymous version of myself. I feel better in this skin, because there is nothing between my story and anyone else.

Writing here has allowed me to gain confidence in my words in a way that I’ve never been able to do before.

I’ve thought about revealing my face soon. I no longer feel that scared of the world finding out my secrets and attaching them to the real me.

But for now I’m going to focus on my words. I don’t trust myself just yet to let anything else get in the way.

Thank you for reading! Here are a few other stories of mine: