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"  When I think back to the fall of 2007, I hear the sound of Pop Rocks. A gentle chorus of snaps, crackles, and pops\u2014like the noise the candy makes when it hits your tongue\u2014emerging from beneath a plastic dome that covers my head. The sound comes with a bracing, unrelenting sting all over my scalp. I am at a salon on the Upper East Side having my hair bleached by a man in lace-up leather pants. As I sit immobile under this hood, cooking, he glides around the airy tiled space in Italian driving loafers, periodically calling to his two shaggy dogs, each dyed a different pastel shade: &amp;quot;Dolce! Gabbana!&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s the first week of my dream job. It feels more like a nightmare. My obsession with music probably began with the Beatles&amp;#039; Rubber Soul cassette that my parents got me for Christmas when I was five or six. I remember closing the door to my room, placing the tape in my pale pink Sony boom box, and dancing around to &amp;quot;Drive My Car&amp;quot; with a teddy bear. In high school I penned plaintive letters to Eddie Vedder in my diary. By college, I&amp;#039;d started reading countercultural rock magazines like CMJ and Britain&amp;#039;s NME. I pretended I was still interested in the kind of normal life I was training for (I was copresident of my college&amp;#039;s prelaw society), but I&amp;#039;d already decided I was going to write about rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll for a living. I just had no idea how to do that. It was like having a really bad crush, except my crush was on an entire city (New York) and the life (that of a professional rock critic) I wanted to lead in it. I spent summers working in Manhattan, made a few friends, and found myself tapped into the then emerging rock scene that would launch the careers of bands such as the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol. But transitioning from rock fan to rock writer seemed a mysterious and financially destabilizing process. So first I got a real job, as a second-grade teacher at a posh all-boys school, where I&amp;#039;d routinely show up in the previous night&amp;#039;s eyeliner. But then I landed an internship at Spin, and by the time I turned 24, I was freelance writing full-time. Next I just had to find a way to get a job on staff at a magazine. I approached this challenge with the competitive zeal I&amp;#039;d previously applied to getting A&amp;#039;s. I crashed VMA parties to meet editors. Consumed dense music encyclopedias like they were novels, so that I&amp;#039;d be able to converse with those editors about rock-nerd go-tos like King Crimson or the Zombies. I even refrained from dating boys in bands so that no one would be able to accuse me of conflict of interest. And eventually it happened: A few months after my twenty-seventh birthday, I found myself in the office of the publisher of a major music magazine being offered the title of editor-at-large. &amp;quot;We are hiring you to be you,&amp;quot; the grizzled exec said. It felt like that moment in My So-Called Life when Jordan Catalano grabs Angela&amp;#039;s hand as they walk down the hallway together, in front of all his friends. Total validation. Total acceptance. Instantly, I became one of those people for whom black town cars idle outside of apartment buildings. Decked in wiggle dresses and heels, I&amp;#039;d hide behind giant sunglasses sipping a latte while being whisked uptown to the TV studios of CNN or the E! channel or The CW local news. A producer would come schmooze with me while I got my hair and makeup done. Then I&amp;#039;d teeter down slick hallways to arctic TV sets, expertly drop a cord down the back of my dress, attach the lavalier microphone to my collar, and explain to the show&amp;#039;s host what my\u2014and by extension my magazine&amp;#039;s\u2014take was on, say, Amy Winehouse. After years of feeling inconsequential, I felt in these moments like I had absolute power. Holly Golightly goes rock. It was glamorous. It was exhilarating. Strangers at my yoga studio started telling me they had seen me on VH1. Looking back, though, it&amp;#039;s clear the whole plan was flawed. As a writer, I was still young and unformed. I needed to be in the office working closely with editors, not &amp;quot;at large&amp;quot; somewhere. But\u2014and this was the glaring fact that I ignored for as long as I could\u2014they hadn&amp;#039;t really hired me to write. By &amp;quot;we&amp;#039;re hiring you to be you,&amp;quot; what my new boss meant was &amp;quot;we&amp;#039;re hiring you to be who we decide you are.&amp;quot; I was a bookworm with Nico bangs and a thing for British indie rock bands. They wanted a hipster avatar who could speak intelligently about Christina Aguilera while the rest of the staff did the real writing. It was, as they say, a job a million girls would kill for\u2014it just didn&amp;#039;t happen to be the one I wanted. And once I realized that, I had no idea what to do about it. That Rita Hayworth line where she says men go to bed with Gilda and wake up with Rita? Well, I&amp;#039;m no Hayworth, but sitting in a barber chair surrounded by a team of people discussing how &amp;quot;Lizzy&amp;#039;s&amp;quot; hair should look, I understood for the first time the weird dissociative horror that comes with playing a skewed version of oneself for a living. Did I agree that Lizzy would look good as a redhead, they asked me? I had no idea. I didn&amp;#039;t know who this Lizzy person was. That day in the salon, my makeover was a reality-TV-style, all-day, multistep affair. After the haircut came the makeup tutorial. &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t pluck your eyebrows, you &amp;#039;tweeze&amp;#039; them,&amp;quot; chastised one of the men in filmy silk shirts who had been assembled for the project. I asked whether I&amp;#039;d still be able to wear my signature red lipstick with this new hair. &amp;quot;Honey, of course you will,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;What do you think\u2014we&amp;#039;re going to make you look cheap? We&amp;#039;re gay!&amp;quot; After a dizzying amount of information about the notorious &amp;quot;TV eye&amp;quot; makeup technique (responsible for that maniacally alert look favored by most on-air personalities) and the genius of Armani foundation (which is pretty genius), I was transformed. Gone, my long brown hair and pale, freckled skin. New Lizzy had an asymmetrical copper bob and a tan. As the publicist paid the thousand-dollar-plus bill, Dolce and Gabbana&amp;#039;s dad pulled me aside and whispered, &amp;quot;Do you eat dinner?&amp;quot; Confused, I nodded yes. &amp;quot;Stop,&amp;quot; he said, sending me on my way. I&amp;#039;m not going to pretend there weren&amp;#039;t perks. Going to Sephora with a blank check is exactly as fun as you&amp;#039;d think it would be. Today I can contour my face for camera with nothing more than a Q-tip and some Wet n Wild brown eye shadow, a skill that has almost never come in handy but brings me pride nonetheless. I&amp;#039;ve learned to appreciate the subtle flush Smashbox&amp;#039;s O-Glow gives my cheeks, the way Touche \u00C9clat makes me look awake in the morning, and the boost Nars&amp;#039; Heat Wave lipstick gives my entire outlook on life. And when the right opportunity presents itself, I still do TV and radio. There are performative aspects of it that I now really enjoy. But that day, when I stepped out of the salon into the delicate late-afternoon light, I felt like I&amp;#039;d been violated. I took a $30 cab ride home, ordered takeout, and got in bed. When I looked in the mirror the next morning, I felt not unhappy, exactly, with what I saw, but totally detached from it. And that&amp;#039;s how it was for months. I walked around in a sort of fugue state, going through the motions of existence like I was following a manual. Lizzy is a person who goes to an office every day. She reads Wikipedia articles about the history of lip-synching, then talks about it on Entertainment Tonight. If asked, Lizzy will tell you she thinks Kelly Clarkson is the most impressive American Idol contestant ever! Lizzy is someone who chooses not to be offended when her boss invites her up to his office to chat about how fat Britney Spears looked on TV the previous night, then has his publicity director offer to have the company pay for Lizzy to join a gym. Lizzy is fine with spending the following Tuesday afternoon at an Equinox, having her body fat pinched by a personal trainer with bad skin. &amp;quot;It was like living with a soldier,&amp;quot; my then boyfriend recalls. &amp;quot;You seemed really angry; you were watching a lot of Alias.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s kind of him to remember me as angry. Part of what has haunted me about the experience is how long it actually took me to feel properly outraged. Rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll is considered the realm of the outcast, in which one&amp;#039;s eccentricities and oddness are sources of power, not shame; in which, I naively assumed, conformity would never be required. I had so idealized this world that, ironically, I completely forgot how to say no to it. And by that point, I had invested so much in the specifics of my dream\u2014staff writer, rock magazine\u2014I was incapable of processing the fact that something about it wasn&amp;#039;t right. I just kept smiling and nodding. But underneath that compliance I was slowly starting to hate myself. And yet, even that last sentence makes me cringe. Really? A haircut made me hate myself? So some dude cut my bangs in an unflattering way and suggested I was fat. So what? I got paid to go to the Grammys. I expensed manicures. And the haircut wasn&amp;#039;t even as hideous as it seemed at the time. When we first discussed this essay, my editor googled an image of me from that era. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not that bad,&amp;quot; she said. And she&amp;#039;s right. When I was nine, I got bored in the bathtub and stuck a wad of grape bubble gum on top of my head, and my dad had to hack off a giant chunk of hair. That looked worse. But at least I had some agency in the look. What was uniquely horrifying about this makeover\u2014the reason it&amp;#039;s not a cute little parable that I retell from my early career days, but rather a trauma so resonant that writing about it made me hit the wine store twice in one day\u2014was that the only choice I made was to abdicate my right to choose. I was literally willing to let someone else tell me who to be in order to get ahead. Of course, like any woman, I&amp;#039;d been contorting myself to suit other people&amp;#039;s expectations\u2014superficial and ideological\u2014since well before I was aware those expectations existed. But in the years prior to the makeover, I&amp;#039;d been convinced those choices were at least partially mine. I wanted to run eight miles a day. I wanted to never eat bread. I wanted to work myself to death in classes I hated so I could go to a good school and become a lawyer. Similarly, I told myself that allowing the magazine to transform me was empowering, that I was using them as much as they were using me. But in the weeks and months that followed, I realized I was wrong. And not just about the red hair. I was wrong about the entire mental framework within which I was operating. I thought that life was like school: If I worked hard and obeyed, I&amp;#039;d be rewarded. For a rock girl, I wasn&amp;#039;t very punk rock. I had entirely too much respect for authority. But this experience changed all that. Not long after I was hired, the magazine started having financial problems, and, suddenly pressed to make use of everybody on staff, they put me to work for real, writing and editing. The first thing I did was dye my hair back to an inky eggplant shade and return to wearing all black (on camera, it makes you blend into the background; your head looks like it&amp;#039;s floating in space). I was no longer allowed to expense mascara and my gym membership, but I did get to keep my new makeup. And I got to write. It was, as I&amp;#039;d hoped, a crucial step in my creative evolution, and I&amp;#039;m grateful for the guidance I eventually received there. But every once in a while\u2014when I get a noxious whiff of cream bleach or I see that red light on a camera lens, telling me we&amp;#039;re on\u2014I get a flashback to that other girl. And I wonder: How far removed from her can I ever really get? Liked this story? Get it first when you subscribe to ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/personal-style/a13905/rockstar-makeover-by-your-employer/>