I Want to Look Like the Girl on the Magazine
Being raised in the early 2000s felt like no big deal at the time. Looking back now it feels strange. There's so much comfort and nostalgia wrapped up in that era, but as an adult I can see just how insane the diet culture and societal pressure actually was. I always want to remind people that I wasn't immune to any of it. I lived it right alongside you.
Society moves in trends. For a long time the focus was on being thin, just packaged differently decade to decade. It tends to pick a body part and fixate on it. The 90s were obsessed with big boobs and a slim waist. The early 2000s were slim everything. By the 2010s it was all about bigger curves. It's wild watching these trends shift, and they've been shifting for decades. Who knows what's next. What really gets me is how much these trends take over people's actual lives with the surgeries, the procedures, the money spent chasing whatever the current standard is.
I wasn't immune either. In the early 2000s the trend was thin eyebrows. I was a little girl looking at a magazine, wanting thin eyebrows so badly that I took my mom's razor and shaved them off completely. I walked out and my whole family was in shock, asking what I had done. Humans are so impressionable, especially young girls watching older women get torn apart publicly for not being perfect. I didn't want to be torn apart either. Maybe I thought I could get a head start but that's not how it works. Society is never satisfied. People will always find something to comment on about your body, your face, your personality, all of it.
Here's something I've come to believe. People who make negative comments about others' bodies and looks are speaking from a place we can't fully understand. You have to be in a really painful relationship with yourself to feel the need to tear someone else down, or to build yourself up by doing it. There's still so much negative talk about women's bodies happening right now, even with how far we've supposedly come. And if that conversation shifted tomorrow, there would just be a new thing to pick apart. You can never make everyone happy. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.
Once you turn inward and start healing your inner child, once you start actually loving yourself, something shifts. You'll notice you stop wanting to say anything negative about anyone else too. Tend your garden. Everyone is born perfect and stays perfect. Our bodies do magical things every single day. We are, quite literally, cosmic dust, walking stars, living a whole life.
I like to think of humans a little like Pokémon. We evolve into new forms of ourselves as we age. I'm an evolved version of who I used to be. I've learned a lot along the way. A decade ago I would have followed every trend, tried every diet, and built my whole life around what society told me to do. Now I'm slowly figuring out what I actually like and it might change again in the future, and that's fine too.
Wanting to change ourselves to fit in is actually a natural human instinct. We're wired to want to belong to a community, to not stand out in the wrong way. If we stand out then we’re prey to a scary predator in the wild. But these trends are nearly impossible to keep up with, and honestly, some of them are kind of ridiculous when you really look at them. Just look at the evolution of eyebrows over the last 20 years: pencil thin, then blocky, then bushy, then "natural" (which somehow still requires three products to achieve). It's wild that something as small as eyebrows even has trends. Following them can be fun, genuinely. I just want you to follow them because you actually like them, not because you're scrambling to keep up with whatever everyone else is doing.
You still have to let yourself shine. Remember, you're a walking star. We're made of literal stardust. Nearly every element in the human body, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, was forged inside a star through nuclear fusion. Billions of years ago, ancient stars exploded and scattered those building blocks across space, and eventually they came together to form planets, including this one. So when I say you're made of stardust, I mean it literally. You're not here by accident and you were never meant to shrink yourself to fit a trend.
It's hard to quiet that outside noise. Social media especially is everywhere, constantly telling you what to want, what to look like, what to chase next. But even just sitting with myself, going back to little me and remembering what she genuinely loved to do, has helped so much. Will any of it be trendy? Maybe. Trends ebb and flow, they always have. I'd rather just do what I actually like.
Do you really want to spend your life hating what you look like, wishing for a change that never actually comes just to better your chances of fitting in? That's no way to live. You can't control the outside noise or the criticism that will always exist somewhere. You can control how you speak to yourself. Those negative thoughts are hard to shake, I know, but planting even one positive thought next to them makes a real difference over time.
It's a journey. I'm still on mine too.
— Ivy ♡
Disclaimer: This blog is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or personalized nutrition counseling. It is not a substitute for care from a qualified healthcare professional. If you are struggling with disordered eating, support is available through the Alliance for Eating Disorders at 1-866-662-1235.