Followed by watching current videos of myself with comments including “wow, she really let herself go” and wincing. Instead, I watch old YouTube videos of myself and can’t believe I would beat myself up over how I appeared in them. It is exhausting and time consuming and prevents me from fully connecting and appreciating the body and face I inhabit in the moment. First, wishing I could achieve something I already had and later wishing I could return to the way I once was.

I feel like I have spent most of my life wishing I looked different.

(With the notable exceptions of many female celebrities who manage to avoid aging altogether.) It’s like we purposefully miss having a sweet spot where we both feel beautiful and are seen as beautiful. But sometimes I feel like we have created this trap for women where it takes so long to learn to love yourself that by the time you do, you are faced with ageism and a longing to be more youthful. And I think the teenagers and young adults of today are already growing up differently than I did. Youth has to be wasted on the young or else the patriarchy would collapse. And once they are old enough to break away from this messaging and learn to love themselves, they have aged out of desirability. It’s a Catch-22 that means a lot of people spend their young adulthood with no conception of what they actually look like. And if you don’t hate the way you look, your arrogance is off-putting and isolating. Girls and women are conditioned to bond over what they hate about themselves. And whatever they don’t have naturally is a fatal flaw. They are taught that whatever they have naturally can be improved. So, to prevent this outcome, girls grow up with highly unrealistic beauty standards and are encouraged to have low self-esteem. Too self-assured and dangerously less reliant on male approval. Recently, I’ve been wondering if society purposefully makes it impossible for most young women to fully appreciate their beauty because, if they realized it, they would become too powerful. But a theory about greater forces that might be at play here. Not a full-blown, the aliens are controlling the government one. Now is the part where I dive into a conspiracy theory. Would I have left that relationship sooner? Would I not have wanted to die because he didn’t love me the way I loved him? I wonder now what my life would have been like if I had been able to see myself more accurately. I felt ugly and gross and eager to get away from prying eyes. He had invited me, and we were in the early stages of dating, but as I met everyone I kept thinking, “I bet they’re wondering what the hell he’s doing with me.” I was hyper aware of the small belly pouch that showed in my dress. I think back on a moment when I walked into a party that was being thrown at this guy’s house. If I was so beautiful, why couldn’t I make my coworker fall in love with me? If I was so beautiful why did my heart keep getting broken? If I was so beautiful, why didn’t I feel more comfortable in my own skin? Instead, I assumed all the compliments from family, friends and the internet were a lie. I looked like a porcelain doll in a shampoo commercial. There was even a time in my 20’s when-and this is embarrassing and difficult for me to admit-I was kind of stunning. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t beautiful because I had other things going for me!Įxcept, I was beautiful. Instead, I could focus on nurturing other parts of my career and talents to build the life I wanted to have. I remember finding immense relief when reading Amy Poehler’s memoir because she said something along the lines of “my looks weren’t ever going to be my currency.” I immediately thought, “Oh my god! Same!” Reading that felt like permission to not have to focus on my appearance and…fail. I knew I was smart and funny, but romantic rejection after romantic rejection led me to believe that my looks were nothing to write home about. I also grew up with anxiety, OCD and poor social skills.

Allison raskin modern love