Take care of yourself. Make yourself tea. Stay in bed all day. Leave the house all day. Take your medication. Surround yourself with people you love. Buy scented candles. Listen to old forgotten music you used to love. Take more walks. Get enough sleep. Watch your favorite movie. Just, please, take care of yourself.
It’s okay to live a life others don’t understand.
(I would never slut-shame a woman for being a sex worker, but I’ll style-shame a bitch all night long for being a tacky, gum-smacking hoodrat.)
Beauty privilege is very real. None of us are imagining it, and if we aren’t born genetic lottery winners, our only option is to compensate with style, grace, and charm. Of course, none of that shit comes cheap. That’s kind of the whole point. It’s all meant to be aspirational and exclusionary. We’re supposed to feel depressed by our skin, agitated by our bodies, and anxious about our invisibility. That’s the insidious subtlety of social control. The worst part is that we know in our rational minds that it’s all bullshit, and yet we’re still plagued with self-loathing when we can’t live up to unattainable beauty standards. No matter how much self-acceptance we achieve, we can still look in the mirror and instantly catalog all the things about ourselves that we don’t think measure up. It’s maddening. It makes us feel like hypocrites even though it’s not our hypocrisy.
I like people who have a sense of individuality. I love expression and anything awkward and imperfect, because that’s natural and that’s real.
Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, ‘She doesn’t have what it takes’; they will say, ‘Women don’t have what it takes’.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
