One girl’s unfiltered truth
I slid the control button from left to right, trying to find the perfect place to rest the little black dot, giving my nose a subtle yet enhancing edit. Once I was “satisfied,” I moved to the next tab and slid the dot back and forth once more, adjusting it ever so slightly to make my breasts appear larger, but not so large that people who see me in real life would go, “Her breasts aren’t that big.”
Once the major changes are done, I smooth over any imperfections left in my face and in my body: the dark circles, the chunky arms, and the scattered dots on my back. Finally, I adjust the width of my face, because smiling with my teeth engorges my already round face.
I do this ritual every once in a while, especially when I feel so insecure that I have to fool everyone who still has access to me that I am, in fact, a desirable person and that I am not an ugly, forgotten hermit who has decided to hide herself from the world. While my friends, family, and colleagues see a familiar face return in my social media profiles instead of a blank female silhouette, I see an area of vulnerability where I could be exposed any minute. So after all the trouble, I end up deleting the pictures in a span of minutes.
I was 18 years old when COVID-19 froze society. Fresh out of high school, I spent my days worrying about how the lockdown had physically changed me. I had nothing to do except eat, lie in bed, and stay awake until 5 a.m. I gained a few pounds, got fungal and back acne, and the circles that sat below my eyes got darker and darker as the lockdowns in Manila grew longer.
In the afternoons, I would turn on the television. Not to keep up with the news or watch a new movie, but to play exercise videos from YouTube that last 30 minutes to an hour, with fair-use bubbly music playing in the background. In my head, they were taunting me, those melodies: “You better keep up to this rhythm, or else your stomach will get bigger, your face will get bigger, and people will see and they will leave.”
On the outside, it looked like self-improvement; a great use of the extra time that suddenly befell people who didn’t have it before the pandemic hit. But behind the guise of it was a girl who didn’t want to be perceived as fat or ugly by everyone who surrounded her.
Every other girl I knew seemed to be confident and beautiful and perfectly fitting into their bodies, but mine was freakishly flat and seemingly unworthy to look at. I felt like a sick creation of Dr. Frankenstein.
With every boyfriend that has come and gone in my more than 20 years of existence, I labored and slaved away to keep up the facade that I believed I was beautiful, attractive, and that I didn’t spend my waking moments loathing what I see every time I encounter mirrors, cameras, or photographs. I try to pretend I am not threatened by every conventionally attractive woman in their lives and on their screens.
In high school, I used to listen to my male classmates rank batchmates’ “hotness.” I watched as my female classmates spent breaks retouching makeup, and—not to be a hypocrite—I did, too.
Through the years, I endured every flippant comment other people made about me straight to my face. My male friends then teased me relentlessly, calling me “pader” instead of my name. But of course I could never say or do anything, because then I would become sensitive, and therefore “uncool” and lose their validation as “one of the cool girls” who happily accepted and rode the wave of their body-shaming disguised as jokes.
Even my female friends would send photos of other girls who bore a resemblance to me, and they knew it couldn’t be me because that girl had a bigger chest.
It was terrifying to admit that a sizable chunk of my existence had been spent trying to appeal to beauty standards.
Growing up in the age of the internet played a role in my insecurities as much as my environment did. I would look at GIFs of Kate Moss saying, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” I would watch girls with hefty breasts, flat stomachs, hourglass figures, sharp noses, and blemish-free faces parade themselves on the internet with their silly dances and their beautiful slides of images. Each time one of them appeared on my screen, I watched entranced, as if I was one of the men ogling their beauty.
But I wasn’t lusting over them or attracted to them in any way; instead, I was envious of the power they hold—and I keep thinking how it might feel like waking up in a body that doesn’t feel monstrous or seeing a face that doesn’t feel distorted and wrong.
In retrospect, being on Tumblr at the age of 12 and seeing reposts of black and white photo sets glorifying thigh gaps and eating disorders was as detrimental to my self-esteem as being told over and over again by peers that I wasn’t “pretty enough.”
All of these factors culminated in a bitter truth: feeling pretty is indeed a privilege. The world, unfortunately, does revolve around this fact, and it was inescapable.
It was terrifying to admit that a sizable chunk of my existence had been spent trying to appeal to the men (and sometimes even women) around me in an attempt to escape the inescapable. It had, at times, concealed all the other parts of myself that were just as important, if not more, than my perceived beauty.
I have been a writer since childhood. I was an avid participant in competitions. I excelled academically, and I had plenty of evidence that told me I am indeed loved—but all of that kept getting lost in the haze of male validation and superficiality.
I can get plastic surgery and become the version of myself I dream of being. But I know no rhinoplasty, breast enhancement, or liposuction can afford me the luxury of seeing beauty within myself and accepting that other women’s beauty does not lessen my own. But alas, that type of wealth is earned, cultivated from childhood. It is taken care of and watered like a tree year after year after year by parents, friends, lovers, and the inherent belief that you yourself are worth space and attention in this world. That you don’t have to kill parts of yourself and reinvent what was born to deserve that space.
I don’t have that privilege (yet). So for now, I delete the edited pictures and upload the unfiltered, raw versions as the first step in many that I will take on the journey to self-love and acceptance.