At some point in my mid-twenties, I refused a doctor’s offer of free and regular Botox. My problem wasn’t age, or fear of ageing, but one long unending migraine. Botox, the doctor explained, might offer some relief by relaxing the muscles around the head and neck, and by blocking some of the nerve signals volleying between those muscles and the brain.

I sensed, if you can believe it, that I was being fobbed off. This was not, as I saw it, the kind of headache you get from working or frowning or clenching too much. The migraine seemed like something so deep in my brain, stemming from something so deep in my mind, perhaps even my soul, that I instilled in myself a faith that the cure (there had to be one) would have to emerge from something similarly deep.

Chronic daily migraines, as I had gleaned from elsewhere, come from a joy-wreckingly heightened sensitivity in the central nervous system – not merely from tense muscles sending signals along the peripheral nerves. Offering to ‘block’ it with a bit of nerve toxin sounded like offering to treat a narcoleptic by holding their eyes open with Sellotape. I began to harbour a beady-eyed vigilance to fixes such as these. This had been one of a large number of vaguely stupid-sounding offerings, none of which had worked, and so I resisted. In fact, decided just to do nothing. I would hold out for an experience, revelation – an encounter of sorts. The kind of thing you can’t just inject.

I am still – now in my mid-thirties – waiting for this thing. Does that mean I regret not doing the Botox? I remain unconvinced it could have cured me, and still nurse the hope of some profounder, ideally lasting, healing source. But now I wonder more about the other joys that are attributed to the paralysing poison – those I’ll likely never know.

I do not mean that I have developed, as my face has started to crease, a greater interest in smoothing it out. Or a greater ease with the idea that women should be expected to sit through and pay for such things. This, had I been so inclined, I might have predicted, and would likely have overpowered my anti-medical sulk. What I mean has to do with what I couldn’t have foreseen: the importance, in the new cosmetic era, of having something to say about Botox.

For what I hadn’t grasped when the doctor offered to paralyse my skull was that we were entering an age in which the once-niche experience of elective muscle freezing would become a veritable fulcrum of both right-wing and liberal feminist debate, a litmus test of which kind of feminist you are. The kind of girl who is bent on ‘resisting’ the call to be maximally smooth, hoping thereby to resist the patriarchal-capitalist punishment of female ageing; or the kind who just wants to have fun, and who supports your ‘choice’ to submit to expensive regimes of facial ironing.

In this new era, commitment to the former camp is a slippery business. Where we might once have understood facial Botox as the embarrassing entertainment of the wealthy and bored, the claims now made on its behalf are nothing less than spiritual, ethical, literary, even.

Botox, I hear, is not just a great way for women to feel ‘empowered’, but – if the press is to be believed – a ‘god-given’, ‘life-changing’, ‘alchemical’ ‘weapon against time’ that makes women shine like ‘queens’. They say it makes you feel ‘gorgeous’ – a feeling hey describe in a way that makes being gorgeous sound like heroin or crack. So good you might even forget that you are going to die one day, even if you look too young to do so. So good you might start to believe that it was this, and not the right to grow old unpunished, that was fundamentally in women’s best interests.

It is hard to argue with those who claim, in beauty terms, to have met God, and still I am moved to try each time the conversation comes up. Hence my wish I had given the Botox just one little whirl – then at least I could have said, with the air of one who knows, Oh I know, but there are bigger things to consider. Or maybe in fact there aren’t. In which case it would also have been nice to find out on the NHS.

Image © The New York Public Library

This essay is part of Resistance, a series on Granta.com where writers tell us about a time they have pushed back against change or advice.