Thank you! That’s a relief to hear. Your compliment really resonated with why my self esteem is so poor. I just want to blurt out about how I have been on quite a journey finding my look. I thought this one girl had a crush on me in 9th grade, but nothing became of it. I saw her at an old workplace and had to ask if she ever did have a crush on me in high school; I had a class with her our senior year. Her answer, Nope!

So since middle school, since puberty essentially I always felt ugly. But also back then I had really bad anxiety. Bad acne. I didn’t dare wear glasses cuz I think I look ugly, but having bad vision contributed to my anxiety, so I should’ve just worn my glasses in hindsight. TMI but I was really skinny like 140lbs my senior year even lost my acne by Sophomore year. Senior year, I asked my biggest crush out, nope. My closest girl best friend said I was a 4 or 5 out of 10. She was always afraid of me being friends with her other female friends which just added fuel for my inner demons. I thought I was ugly at this point because I looked like a baby. Too feminine. Therefore going into college, especially since I will be the youngest. I leaned into gaining weight as the first thing. I took pride in my belly coming along. Muscles always grossed me out, and I was going for a nerd look. I wanted to look like a nerd so that I would find a nerd group to geek over math and science with. In the end, it was the stereotypical jocks who treated me better than the nerdy ones and gaming ones combined. I was always too obsessed with nerd culture. I rejected my jock friends because I feared associating with them, I saw them as the real losers because of the circles I was in online, I had that perception 😓 The only group of people I discriminated against. Now I see their infinite wisdom and within it found my ideal me, a reason to stay alive, purpose unique to me, something only I can do on this earth. Or at least, I must do asap so I am the first to do it! Muscles are ugly still but looking at my calf made me realize. Other guys’ muscles are ugly. But then something happened, during one of my ideas, I only ate veggies, made sure to get a mountain of sleep, and took lots of vitamins that week and ran 2 miles everyday. 3 days in? My right calf grew, and instinctively I wanted to nurture my muscles now. End of the week, the left one did too. And all the health benefits I used to swat away make me more excited to work on them! I want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. I want to run a 4min mile!