The Aesthetic of Womanhood  I have written in the past about my thoughts around womanhood and adulthood in general. I have some more thoughts that I want to expand on.  I touch on how part of the reason I don't feel like an adult isn't because I'm not measuring up to adult responsibilities rather because I feel like I don't fit the aesthetics of adulthood. I feel like I've unpacked a lot of that limitting belief, however, I feel like there has been a greater emphasis on how I feel like I don't fit the aesthetics of womanhood lately. I've been having some weird feelings around my gender where sometimes I feel like a blob rather than a woman. Like I can accept myself and see myself as a girl and an adult but for some reason not a woman. As my nonbinary friends like to say "Gender is a performance and I have forgotten my lines."  I feel like lately I've grounded myself in this regard and touched some grass but I still wanted to spill everything in a journal post. Basically it started like this: I started watching some self care videos because I find it relaxing to listen to them in the background. A lot of it were just people talking about their skincare routine, their shower routine, etc. And then the algorithm did its thing and I started getting recommeded these "beauty maintenance videos" where women would talk about their extensive beauty practices beyond showering and skincare. These include but aren't limitted to getting your lashes done, getting your nails done every two weeks, getting a facial once a month by an esthetician, getting waxed, and even in come cases botox and filler. There was also an emphasis on dressing in a classy old money style mainly made of neutral clothing in simple but fitted silhouettes. And all of this was in the name of elevating yourself to become the woman of your dreams and glowing up.  Me finding this type of content also coincided with my birthday. Normally, I do get the birthday blues but this year that just didn't happen (rather I had the genocidal blues but that's another topic I have covered previously). Instead, I caught myself feeling a heightened insecurity about my appearance as someone who was turning 24. It wasn't about aging rather it was about how there are things about my appearance that I am still insecure about since I was 13/14 years old. I still do to a certain extent feel like that teenager that is still waiting for that glow up. A glow up back then simply meant becoming hot after puberty. It meant getting taller, having your weight get distributed in a less awkward way, learning how to dress, getting clearer skin after the hormonal acne cleared up, getting your braces removed etc. For me, glowing up in a lot of ways connected to me losing weight. And even after all these years, I never lost that extra chub, rather I probably added more to it as my body transitioned from having a narrower adolescent frame to a larger womanly frame. And by that I mean that in addition to probably gaining some fat I also gained a lot of muscle and my shoulders and hips did get wider. I notice this a lot more when I'm volunteering with teenagers where a normal to slightly chubby teenager still looks smaller than a 20 something that is quite thin purely because the teenager's bodies haven't finished growing. While that observation does help in the way that I tone down the unrealistic standards I hold myself at times, in the end of the day, the fact still remains, I am bigger than when I was when I was 14 and starving myself. If I was too big then, I am a monster now.  To tie everything together, my insecurities were flaring up a bit around my birthday around the time I found a lot of the glow up/ beauty maintenance content. And as someone who still felt like a teenager who didn't become hot after puberty and who doesn't feel like an adult due to aesthetic reasons and who is watching these grown women have these intensive beauty routines, the content started affecting my psyche. I also think that me being on my own and financailly independent is a factor because even though I wanted to do some things like getting my eyebrows done, I either didn't have the money or my parents would have stopped me. But basically, through this content, I felt a little pressured to have a "beauty maintence routine" even if it was expensive as fuck just to feel more like a woman who appeared more, elegant, classy, and sophisticated, adjectives that I don't think really apply to me but that I associate with being a woman.  I honestly feel like I need to touch grass and this video knocked some sense into me tbh on how niche this really is and how fiscially unattianable this is for most people especially in this economy.