Rosie O’Donnell went under the knife earlier this year for a procedure that she swore she would never get.
“I used to feel very strongly about facelifts,” O’Donnell, 64, wrote in a lengthy poem titled “Decisions” and shared via her Substack on Monday, May 25. “Not casually — morally. I had assigned myself as head of all women who would never — ever [get one].”
The comedian added that she previously believed getting a facelift was a “betrayal” of feminism and aging. However, her opinion began to change when she lost 50 pounds.
“It wasn’t wrinkles — it was gravity. I’d look in the mirror and think, ‘This isn’t aging, this is melting with intention,’” she continued. “I tried to be evolved about it and say things like, ‘This is natural. This is earned.’ And then … ‘Umm, how earned does it have to look?’ There’s a point where acceptance starts to feel like lying.”
O’Donnell said she began quietly “gathering information” about the procedure, but her child Clay, 13, found out and tried to talk her out of it. (In addition to Clay, O’Donnell is a mother to four other children: Vivienne, Blake, Chelsea and Parker.)
“‘You earned your wrinkles,’” she recalled Clay telling her. “Which — first of all — rude. But also … correct. Then Clay said, ‘Young women look up to you.’ And finally — with strong effect — ‘I wouldn’t be able to respect you if you did it.’ And that one … landed.”
O’Donnell explained that Clay sounded “exactly” like her younger self.
“Like my younger, more certain, more morally rigid self had somehow moved into my house and was now judging my face,” she added. “It really threw me. I delayed the whole thing for months, just sitting with it, thinking.”
O’Donnell said she ultimately realized she needed to teach Clay that bodies do not “belong to an idea.”
“Because that’s still not freedom — that’s just a different authority telling you what you’re allowed to do with your own face,” the Rosie Show alum noted. “I want [Clay] to grow up in a world where they don’t feel like they have to change, but also know they can, if they want to, without losing moral standing in their own life.”
O’Donnell finally underwent the procedure in January after finding a doctor who had worked on some of her friends.
“Right before I went under, I grabbed my doctor’s hand and said, ‘I will never say, ‘God, I wish you did more.’” And I meant it,” she recalled. “I didn’t want to become that voice — the one that keeps moving the goalpost, never satisfied, the one that turns their own face into a problem one can never quite solve. I wanted a limit. I wanted to still be me, just … less haunted. And I do look like me — A slightly more well-rested, emotionally stable version of me.”
O’Donnell admitted that “no one has noticed” her new face.
“I didn’t disappear, I didn’t become someone else — I just stopped arguing with the mirror,” she added. “And maybe that’s enough. Or at the very least … it’s what a lower deep plane face lift looks like when it minds its own business.”
O’Donnell concluded, “As I get ready for the last day of school with my youngest — the caboose — here at 64 years old, with a new lower face and neck, just happy to be alive, able to feel and choose, and use my voice whenever I feel called to, for the girl I was, the woman I am and all those joining my ranks as we carry on in act three, this is me.”
