PicoBlog

Picture this: it’s a beautiful early May Sunday that feels like the beginning of something promising. You woke up just in time for sunrise, did a grocery run, and managed to tackle a few chores and a couple of emails. You did laundry, had a nutritious breakfast, applied all the serums in your arsenal, and headed to the HIIT class you’d booked the night before. Then it’s sauna time, shower, and by the time it gets to noon, you’re practically feel-good-soaring in the clouds, wondering if you’re a woman or an Instagram reel personified.

Heading back from the class, you happen to make a fatal mistake: you catch a glimpse of your reflection in a store window, and something deep and primal within you causes a rift.

Collision. Emotional car crash. Betrayed by the glaze of old acne hyperpigmentation more visible than usual thanks to the post-sauna flush, hair that looks like you’ve yet to discover what a hairbrush is, and, well, the fat on your body seems to have been genetically distributed in all the wrong places, so even the cutest Alo fit failed to compensate. Ugh. It took less than a second for all your hard-earned endorphins to dip. You don’t feel amazing anymore, really — your internal monologue switches from “I’m so glad I did all of this today” to “Do as much as you want, it won’t change anything or turn you into Devon Lee. I mean, look at you — you’re ridiculous.”

That was my morning today, and now it’s cracking at the seams. As we know, what goes up must come down, and what comes down must end up in a Substack essay. Suddenly, I’m questioning what the point of such a stellar model-off-duty morning was. Life doesn’t taste as glamorous or Instagrammable as it did five seconds ago — rather I’m trying to orchestrate a performance of someone who naturally lives the Erewhon smoothie lifestyle, ending up as a close enough caricature. There’s a disconnect between how I feel and what I see: clearly, I can play pretend by the hot girl rulebook but I struggle to dress the part. All of this doing only leads to a strong urge to undo — staring at my reflection, poking at different parts of my body and face, flaws becoming confirmation bias for everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life. Should I just lock myself in my room until I’m beautiful enough to do all these things? I shall lay low until I look like the kind of woman who has an extravagant morning routine, an expensive gym membership, and a body to show for it. Then I’ll deserve this. I’ll deserve to feel good. Cleaner, slimmer, better: I’m sure that version of me exists somewhere out there. Until then, there’s hardly anything to feel amazing about, and surely nothing to be proud of.

The ideal you

I’ve done a lot of therapy in my time, so recognizing poisonous beliefs in myself is easy. Recognizing that striving for perfection and absolute hotness is nothing but a medium of control and cannot, by definition, be reached is not hard, either. Now, undoing them is a whole other ordeal — because these beliefs aren’t really mine to begin with. These thoughts, fueled by beauty standards and our deep ingrained attachment to beauty as a marker of worthiness and value, are not isolated instances or faulty beliefs from childhood: they’re a result of an oppressive instrument, her majesty the patriarchy (surprise surprise!) A persistent invasion of what could, in theory, be sunshine and rainbows. Obsessing over beauty attainment sucks the joy out of our lives and yet we’re convinced life is devoid of joy unless we’re attaining beauty. Striving for beauty is all I’ve ever known; it’s my modus operandi and honed skill, and I can’t fathom doing anything else. I don’t know who I am if I’m not trying to be beautiful. I have an identity and a life outside of it, but it’s not entirely satisfying or holistic. “If a woman does real work — and even if she has clambered up to a leading position — she is always under pressure to confess that she still works at being attractive,” Susan Sontag wrote in Women’s Beauty: Put Down or Power Source?

The ideal “you” is a concept, not a person, Valerie… Let it go.

I can’t let it go! I need to be her! Where the fuck is she?

When I’m failing to feel beautiful, I crave stillness. I wish to not be seen or perceived until further notice. I crave nothingness, because deciding to fully live despite not meeting my standards of hotness would require me to take the radical, unapologetic step to self-acceptance — something I, nearing 26 years of age, have still not been able to learn. Beauty is a fixed concept; a list of guidelines to adhere to. We understand that these guidelines are hardly applicable to a living breathing woman: beauty is something solidified and perfect, transfixed, things we should be buying, muscles we should be moving, foods that can and cannot be put in our mouths. If it weren’t sold as a concept, it simply wouldn’t sell. As the beauty industry is growing 6% a year and is expected to reach $580 billion by 2027, it’s evident that our sense of self-worth must shrink proportionally to make space for it.

Our journey to ultimate beauty and health is not something we embark on, rather something we grapple with. The sustenance of beauty requires motionlessness: perfect hair that never gets greasy, perfect body that never bloats, and perfect face that defies gravity and aging. This kind of sustenance is only maybe somewhat doable in complete and utter isolation. Anyone who’s ever struggled with an ED or BDD would know how it feels: your desire to freeze in time “until” you’re perfect becomes your reality. Suddenly, you’re not living anymore — you’re just existing at best. Striving for the unattainable standard is your full-time job, your side hustle, and your free time. What was sold to you as a means to enhance your life becomes your whole life instead, and there’s no space left for anything else to occur in this vacuum chamber. My favorite person on Substack Jessica DeFino writes: “We are “unable to countenance failure” (to be beautiful or, for those less-obsessed, to meet an isolated ideal — clear skin, for example, or smooth hair) “to point of rejecting life” (spending a significant portion of our time, money, energy, effort, headspace — our literal life force — on becoming beautiful or meeting the isolated ideal.)”

The perfect body is not a destination — it’s going to change on a near-daily basis. The perfect face is not a destination, either — there’s aging, hormones, and flare-ups. And once you realize if it’s not one thing, it’s another, the whole quest ceases to make sense. When I reached my lowest (unnatural for me, so it barely lasted) body fat percentage, I lost so much hair and developed a serious case of cystic acne, the newly achieved physique was hardly enjoyable. When I finally started to let go of the obsession with my frame, I started seeing early signs of aging on my face, which meant that my fixation on fat wasn’t conquered but replaced with a more existential one on nasolabial folds. See how the journey never ends? This is why your coworker is somehow always on a new diet. This is why plastic surgery rarely stops with one procedure. This is why you succumb to mourning over old pictures of yourself, always thinking you looked much better in retrospect. We wish to trap our beauty, capture it like a photograph, and keep it in an airtight bag. But the human body will never be transfixed. Like oil and water, we don’t mix with perfect stillness. And trying to chase after it is a waste of a perfectly good life.

Do I deserve a hot girl life?

As beauty is neatly tied to self-worth, we’re stepping into dangerous territories here. Deservingness is tricky because feeling like we’re worthy of a good life is a prerequisite for actually living one. What a great word — from French desservir is to be worthy of, earn, merit. Deservingness is both the chicken and the egg of self-worth: one way to look at it is through the self-efficacy theory developed by Bandura (1977.) The theory suggests that individuals' beliefs about their capabilities influence their actions and outcomes. In the context of beauty standards, those of us with low self-efficacy see ourselves as less deserving of positive things, regardless of our efforts in pursuing beauty ideals — hence the embarrassment that comes with trying to live out our picture-perfect Pilates girl life while not feeling like one at all. Self-improvement then starts to feel like a hoax: to truly believe in our goals and aspirations, we must first feel capable. To be hot we must feel hot — not the other way around. And when we’re constantly sold the idea that we’re not good enough as we are, that something about us is inherently faulty and needs to be fixed, where can we possibly source the self-efficacy to do what’s good for us? Welcome to the hamster wheel.

Norman Feather explored deservingness in his book Values, Achievement, and Justice (1999.) According to Feather’s model, for individuals or groups to be judged as deserving, two requirements must be met: first, the target must be seen as personally responsible for the actions that lead to particular outcomes. Second, actions and outcomes must be evaluatively consistent. Here’s where the disconnect becomes clear as day: I’m living the life (fitness, eating healthily, performing beauty rituals) of someone who deems herself hot, beautiful, deserving, and acts like it, yet my distorted self-perception would like to argue — it minimizes and disqualifies any positive outcome I’m striving for (better physical and mental health, stamina, longevity, literally anything else) because I fail to deliver on the only outcome that matters to me in the first place: that is, meeting the ideal beauty standard.

Tying our self-worth, and thus deservingness, to beauty is the Achilles heel of our being, but they’re so deeply intertwined we can’t see where one ends and the other begins. A consistent inability to achieve perfection adds fuel to the fire — the question of “Should I do what’s good for me?” becomes “Do I even deserve to feel good?”. Feeling undeserving of life’s fruition in this current moment pushes us further into fixating on either a hypothetical perfect future or the bittersweet past, neither of which is accessible to us in the present moment. I will have the perfect body by summer so I can enjoy my vacation. I used to fit into those jeans. I will get preventative Botox so the future me is wrinkle-free.

How much more of this can I take? How many more probiotics, serums, diets, tears? Honestly, I don’t know. One of my greatest fears is that in a few decades, I’ll look back on my life just to find I’d spent the majority of my brief time on earth trying and failing to feel beautiful. Unless I do something about it, that fear is going to come true. I want an escape out of this maze, and I know you want it too. Get in the car and burn rubber.

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What I’m writing isn’t going to heal anyone, defeat patriarchy, or magically make us abolish the beauty standards. I’m not changing lives — first, I fully recognize that I’m a white, cisgender, able-bodied woman, writing thinkpieces on beauty from a place of privilege. Second, it’s not like any of this is new: from Victorian women squeezing themselves in corsets to the Ozempic craze de nos jours, the presence of beauty as an oppressive force rooted in white supremacy and misogyny is as ancient as some religions. What I want to do —and what feels doable on a personal and collective level— is begin to forcefully and consciously detach “worthiness” from “beauty”, recognizing that while both can fuel each other (there’s nothing wrong with feeling more beautiful in full glam VS bare-faced, and nothing wrong with trying to look younger and thinner) they’re not interdependent. Once you peel off that layer and see that your deservingness is a birthright, and feeling worthy of good things should be accessible to you here and now, it’s easier to see beauty as merely a component of the human experience, not its sole purpose and destination. Then, the obsession may start to loosen its grip around your neck.

And while I can’t begin to take away the pain every single woman experiences regarding her appearance, I can suggest a few things to read/listen to/follow that have helped me dig a bit deeper, get rid of a few pervasive thoughts, and reframe some of my set-in-stone beliefs:

until next week. love you warmly.

with reticence,

valerie

Thank you for reading club reticent. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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