There was a stretch of my teenage years when my entire morning routine revolved around eyeliner. Not sleep, not homework, not my mom yelling down the hallway, nothing was going to stop me from doing it. While other people were still fully unconscious, I was up hours before school, hunched over a mirror with my trusty e.l.f. Expert Liquid Eyeliner.

Perfect? Absolutely not. Symmetrical? Almost never. I would always try to fix my mistakes by adding more eyeliner. The bigger the better… right? Those early mornings had a kind of ritual energy to them: dragging the brush over my eyes, accidentally globbing way too much product on, cleaning it off with my Q-tip, and committing to whatever shape happened first. There was no stopping me—once the line went down, I lived with it. Honestly, that felt powerful, like embracing the version of myself who didn’t need to be polished or precise.

When I think back on that era, it wasn’t really about looking cool. It was about trying things, expressing something loud when the rest of my life felt quiet, and carving out a moment every morning where I got to decide who I was. Even if that person had eyeliner that smudged by the second hour.

I don’t wing my eyeliner much anymore, but every time I see that little e.l.f. bottle in my makeup bag, I remember the girl who woke up at sunrise just to paint on confidence, even if her eyeliner was a total mess.