I grew up watching women disappear. They started full of color and ended up edited, filtered, erased by comparison. I thought that was what we were supposed to do, shrink until we fit inside the version that gets approval. I spent years trying to polish myself into something I was not, believing maybe then I would belong. But beauty that needs permission is not beauty, it is submission dressed in glitter. And I am done performing for eyes that do not see, for voices that call themselves supportive while measuring the width of my flaws. I used to think invisibility was safety, now I know it is a slow kind of death.
Being a woman feels like living under inspection. Everyone wants a piece, an answer, a softened version of you that makes them comfortable. We learn to apologize for our volume, our silence, our hunger. Some days I catch myself judging my own face the way I was taught to judge others, and it makes me sick. Because what I see is a body that has carried too much and still stands. A face that knows more than it should and keeps going anyway. A life that was never built for display but for endurance. That, to me, is beauty. Not a product or an ideal but a pulse. The kind that survives mirrors, the kind that breathes even when the light is unkind.
Change came quietly, in moments that did not feel heroic. I stopped asking what kind of woman I should be and started asking what kind of life I wanted to live. I used to scroll and compare, now I scroll and study the lie. The symmetry, the light, the illusion of ease. It is not envy anymore, it is anthropology. I watch those perfect faces and think of everything they must silence to look that calm. The world calls them aspirational, I call them exhausted. Because perfection is not peace, it is punishment. And I think of the women around me, the ones who work, mother, love, cry, and still manage to laugh like the world is not crushing them. None of them trending, all of them real. That is my tribe.
Days still come when I forget all of this. When I see perfection parade across a screen and feel that old urge to fix myself, to earn a softness I was never meant to have. Then I remember how much of my life I already spent doing that. I remember how often I said sorry for existing in my own shape, how often I dimmed myself to be digestible. I am done being a project. I am not waiting for a glow-up or a transformation. I am here, raw and half-formed, building peace instead of approval. There is no award for that, but there should be. Because it takes more courage to stay than to pretend. There should be something sacred in surviving womanhood without losing your own face to the mask they sell you.
Every time I meet a woman who looks like life has touched her, I see beauty that is not afraid of itself. I see rebellion in her eyes, quiet but sharp. We do not owe softness to a world that profits from our insecurity. We are not background, we are the frame. I have stopped competing with women and started recognizing myself in them. I am tired of pretending that real means flawed. Real means alive. It means we are not waiting to be seen by someone else to exist. We already are. And if they do not call that beautiful, it is because they have forgotten what beauty was ever supposed to mean. We are the proof that strength has a face, that beauty is not a costume but a condition of being. I am one of them, and that is enough.
"And now what? I'm free myself..."
All photographs and content used in this post are my own. Therefore, they have been used under my permission and are my property.
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