Casey Jo Graham Welmers
Yoga Nidra for Resting Bitch Face
I was 21 the first time I was informally diagnosed with the condition. No name existed back then, so it was commonly referred to as “looks like a bitch” or “needs to smile more” or simply “bitchy.” I thought it had to be some kind of sick, cosmic joke. I was too young, too quiet, too new in my existence to really have a bitchy bone in my body.
“There must be some kind of mistake,” I told my manager, Tim. He was a pleasant looking man in his early 30s who seemed to genuinely enjoy his job at the upscale Italian chain restaurant where I was employed. Maybe he wasn’t a pleasant man at all. Maybe he was just fortunate enough to look pleasant, unlike me, the RBF afflicted. Tim shook his head and referenced my report, a pair of yellow customer comment cards, scribbled messages stating, “hostess should smile, not very welcoming” and “your hostess should appear less serious and more friendly.” I clutched the table of the Tuscan brown booth in which we sat, scooting left to avoid a crusty remnant of rigatoni. Tim dropped the cards and made a steeple with his hands under his chin.
“You’re supposed to be the face of the restaurant,” he said.
I knew then that my prognosis was poor.
~
I made an appointment for a second opinion with the mirror. The mirror has a history of sometimes revealing things I wish to ignore: acne, bloodshot eyes, smudged mascara. The superstition around seven years of bad luck for breaking a mirror is probably the only reason I’d never smashed one in a fit of teenaged angst. We regarded each other, the mirror and I.
I’m sorry, said mirror me. I must point out the way the corners of your mouth tend to rest in a line, or sometimes jog downward, as if terrified of your severe looking eyes.
I huffed back that my eyes were not ‘severe’, objecting to such strong language. We settled on ‘serious,’ instead. I argued that serious eyes and a straight mouth weren’t enough to warrant this diagnosis.
It could be dangerous to ignore the signs, said mirror me. I quietly concluded maybe she was the one with the problem, not corporeal me. We sat in silent contemplation for a while, stuck in a reflective ouroboros. Corporeal me finally exhaled on the mirror’s surface, wrote “bitch” in the fog.
~
“Do I look chronically pissed?”
My roommate never bothered to look up from her joint rolling to answer my question. She was younger and blonder and bustier than me, had the commercial appeal of a Doublemint Twin despite being born very much alone. We worked together at the Italian chain restaurant.
“You look like you. Don’t let them fuck with your head.”
She lit the joint, took an abbreviated drag before adding an extra “fuck-em” for emphasis. Because I was also high, I imagined I could see these words curl out of the smoke, fluffy and cute, like something scrawled on a Lisa Frank school folder.
I would have preferred a response in the negative, a reassurance that my face harbored nothing moody and everything sunny. It was the absence of this that bolstered my diagnosis. I folded myself into our couch, a piece of furniture we determined had been ridden through the 80’s wet and put to the curb dry. I imagined the dust I sometimes slapped from the cushions to be at least 50% cocaine.
“What should I do about it?”
“I don’t know, yoga?”
She was in lotus pose, stoned out of her mind. It struck me as an obvious and valid option.
“Yoga,” I responded, rolling the word across the room. Maybe if I inverted myself, executed a wheel pose or a headstand, my features would appear gorgeous and bubbly. My mouth would be forced upwards, my cheeks would flush, my eyes would twinkle with the strain. I could walk around on my hands, loose everything in my pockets, expose my breasts because my shirt would ride up. I could ask, desperate and uncomfortable, “how do you like me now?”
~
I had accepted the fact of my features by the time “resting bitch face” became formally recognized by the broader community. Finally, I had a clinical excuse for not being able to smile more and being asked what was wrong when everything was perfectly fine. I imagined taking the hands of those who had insulted me in my own, looking gravely into their eyes, informing them I was actually born this way. Of course they would exhibit pity and rage at such injustice.
Unfortunately, this was not the response. With the formal recognition of RBF came antidotes: Botox for angry muscles, filler for harsh angles. I decided to go the holistic route of trying not to give a fuck, but it was around this time that I was also diagnosed with a common RBF comorbidity: looking tired.
If my grandmother were alive to consult, she would tell you that I likely inherited looking tired from my mother, because the first words out of my grandmother’s mouth whenever she saw my mother were, “you look tired.” For this she had a litany of remedies: soggy green tea bags, eye masks, corrective concealers in bizarre hues. I looked tired regardless of the amount of sleep I got, but I was getting less and less, haunted by strange dreams of demented infants and walls made of teeth. My sister, who also inherited looking tired but was mostly spared RBF, suggested yoga nidra.
“It’s like a sleep meditation,” she said.
My sister lived with chronic anxiety and self-medicated with alcohol until she was diagnosed with colon cancer. She used heavy doses of THC and the purring voices of New Age women dressed in formless linen to lull her into fitful sleep when she could no longer imbibe.
“So does it work for you?”
“The guy with Scottish accent and the woman with the echo-y voice sometimes do,” she said, sending me a link to the app she was using to listen to these sotto voce spells.
Jennifer, the woman with the echo-y voice, was hypnotic. I would have listened to her read Betty Crocker recipes, tell me just how much tuna should be in tuna noodle casserole. In a parallel universe I fall asleep to her instructing me to use albacore in oil and bake at 400 degrees, but in this one she asked me to call back energy from external demands and reassured me that I am not bound by a waking world identity.
Jennifer taught me how to relax every fiber of my being, scalp to baby toe. The first time all the tiny muscles in my face released, I imagined myself suddenly beatific, transformed, un-bitch-faced. Was this the yoga that could treat me? Jennifer instructed me to have “vacation eyes" and a "vacation mouth" and I could picture it: my features light and carefree, lolling in lounge chairs with tropical cocktails at their tender pink sides. My eyeballs in inner tubes gliding down a lazy river, my tongue in repose, sunglasses askance.
Is there something you wish to hand over to the oracle of sleep? Jennifer asked.
Yes, I remember thinking. Everything.
~
Despite the yoga nidra my sister and I slept less and less, until she started to sleep more because she was actively dying. I wondered if there was yoga nidra for zombies, the grieving, for losing your best friend. My sister's brow was knit together in permanence, the corners of her mouth plunged downward in pain, her face hollowed out.
"You look so much alike now!"
My sister's friend made this assessment before I allowed the door to slam not-so-softly in her face. How pleasant to be informed that I shared the concave, drawn features of someone dying from cancer. Again, I consulted the mirror, but mirror me was unusually mum. This is active bitch face, I thought. Mirror me must have sensed that, known I would lash out at any suggestion to the contrary.
In my sisters bedroom I crawled under her blankets and gazed at her face— a face I'd seen since it was first pushed into this crazy world, full of hair and membrane and wonder.
What do you dream baby sister?
Something happy, I hoped. Times when we were young and smiling, dripping with watermelon juice, turning underwater handstands in Lake Michigan.
~
I watched my sister's face when she left this world, too; watched as she extracted a segment of my heart and vanished with it. My face is the last she saw before she slipped away. I know, in that moment, she’d have thought it the loveliest damn thing she’d ever laid eyes on.
~
My sister and I were raised like good American girls to regularly tear our features apart and throw them in the garbage, a ritual we performed often and in tandem.
"Look at this spot!" she would exclaim, pointing toward visual evidence of her sun worship.
"Yeah, I see it, but what about these lines?” I smiled, revealing a smattering of fine crow’s feet pattering about the corners of my eyes. We scrutinized and picked, pulled and sighed. We cared too much or just enough or too little, depending on who you asked.
“Would you like me to treat those?” A friend who administers Botox recently asked, pointing to the crow’s feet. My hand flew protectively toward my eyes, toward proof of all the times my sister and I had laughed so fiercely we’d nearly fallen over, or peed ourselves, or attracted the attention of strangers.
“God no,” I choked. I wonder what my sister would have looked like at 50, at 70, at 90, what else in this life we would have laughed at so deliriously that we collapsed.
~
Two days before she died I helped my sister to the bathroom, her legs swollen like water balloons. She’d looked in the mirror, released a string of profanity at her sunken cheeks and tangled hair. I will never get over this; the fact that our brains have been so thoroughly fucked with that on deaths doorstep —her liver rattled with tumors, her body swelling up and wasting away—some programmed part of my sister’s brain still thought about her appearance. I wish I could go back and tell her to avoid seeking second opinions from the mirror; tell her not to listen to our borderline grandma or shitty comment cards or pleasant looking men or any of it, really.
Of course there’s no going back. Instead I bitch about my face still being here while hers rests in peace. In yoga class and in bed I lie in corpse pose, attempting to reach through the universe to find her on the other side. I want to hold her perfect ghost face in my astral hands, to tell her how stunning we are, how devastating.
I wonder if faces even exist beyond death. I wonder if I’d want them to.
Casey Jo Graham Welmers writes about nature, pop culture and existential ephemera from the Great Lakes State. Find her latest words in Hobart, HAD, The Bulb Region, Farewell Transmission and more, at caseyjo.carrd.co
