Maybe I’ll just start on Monday, or maybe I need another diet, or another workout plan? Or maybe… It’ll just have to be next there that I become “her.” These were the thoughts that followed me all throughout my highschool and college years. Anytime I realized just how much I had fallen off the goals I set forth for myself to become the IT girl. The thing is, throughout my early adolescence, dieting and working out would work to a certain extent. Until it became too difficult to maintain day in and day out, to the point where I would eventually fall victim to the part of me that I was convinced had clearly hated the idea of becoming a tumblr girl. I say that I want to become the girl on my tumblr blog, but why can’t I do it? Why can’t I just glow up — I ended up drowning myself in self hate, disgust, and feelings of unworthiness every year that I was faced with the reality that I didn’t become “her.”

Now, being young and rooted in low self worth, I had this way of thinking that, since I would always fall short on my goals, I wasn’t fully ready for life. Whether that applied to me not being t ready to go to the beach with my friends that summer because I felt my body wasn’t how I had hoped it would be, or being painfully shy and only every talking to boys through text because I couldn’t bear to meet them in real life as I felt I didn’t resemble the other girls around me that seemed so pretty and perfect. Or feeling like I couldn’t wear the outfits I obsessed over on Instagram because my hips looked a little different in the same dress. Whatever it was that I always desired to have, I always had this energy of unreadiness. The unfortunate part of this is that the more I felt like that, the more susceptible I became to social media fad diets and workout plans that I still believed could fix my issues. I was convinced that I was the issue.

There’s no denying that we naturally go through some sort of glow up as we age and throughout college I slowly started to grow into my features and learned what looked good on me and what didn’t. Since I also had a history of cycling through workouts and diets, my physical body ended up transforming more than I really thought. My body, my face, my style, my personality did change and people started to notice. The problem was that I still had the same mindset that started this glow up journey in the first place. I was stuck at sixteen, thinking I was too physically unattractive to put myself out there and live my life, along with an unhealthy obsession of cycling through diets. And because my body did start to transform and I started getting more attention, it kept me addicted to chasing my end goal, to be the it girl. I started getting attention from boys, I was able to start dressing more and more like the girls on my tumblr, I was able to post on social media and get the attention that I saw other girls were receiving.

The more I attracted the attention I worked so hard to achieve, I started realizing that this feeling was fleeting. I started to realize after spending hours getting ready to take instagram photos to post in hopes that the guy I was interested in would like the photo was…draining. I started to notice that I was only happy on the days I went to the gym or when I was perfectly following my diet plan even after achieving “close enough” to the tumblr girl body. I realized that there was this unsustainable level of upkeep of my self worth and confidence which was entirely dependent on external forces such as men, working out, dieting, and social media popularity.

You see, sometimes you have to do things over and over before you realize that it’s not working. The realization that I made in my late teens and early twenties was that no matter what I did to try to change my appearance, I would always find myself still unsatisfied with my looks. Eventually I realized that I was stuck with an unhealthy relationship with food, fitness, and success. I also realized the type of person I wanted to be perceived as online didn’t create the life that I thought it would. I also thought that the attention that I would get from boys online or offline because of how hot I looked would make me feel at peace. But the truth is, it didn’t. It didn’t because these addictions were unhealthy. They were short term. They weren’t sustainable. I wanted to feel happy in my body all the time, I wanted to feel like I wasn’t on a diet all the time, I wanted to feel free, all the time.