#anyway been thinking abt it forever and it’s articulated soooo badly here

[holdurown]

i keep thinking about how this generations obsession with aesthetics has made me and others suffer! in my head i have the image of a girl who looks perfect, dresses in one style, whose interests perfectly correspond with her chosen aesthetic. but i don’t always look good. sometimes i feel like i can’t wear dark makeup or dress differently or do activities that don’t jive with the aesthetic that i’ve been told i have. how stupid! how stupid to decide that because you want to be the type of person who read poetry you can’t also be the type of person who reads ya or whatever. the other day i was thinking about traveling, and i imagined myself posting an instagram picture!! instead of just enjoying the trip! and then i thought: oh no i can’t travel, i don’t like how i look, so the picture would be bad. it’s better to not travel if i don’t look super hot or whatever. the idea that you have to meet some threshold of beauty or put-togetherness before you can try new things is so sick! i’m tired of denying myself pleasures because they don’t fit into a narrative or a vision illustrated by numerous instagram posts. soft girls wear light makeup and tennis skirts and mary janes and they like painting and reading and they wear headbands. dark academia means wearing trousers and blazers and going to bed at 3 am because you were translating an oresteia and only kissing people under lamp posts or whatever. how am i supposed to be satisfied with my life when every time i do something i have to make sure it’s the kind of thing a girl who loves cottagecore would do. people don’t believe that teenage girls can have multiple dimensions. almost every girl i know is trying to reach a standard that requires them to buy new outfits and learn to do new make up and starve themselves to look like a random picture on pinterest. no one tries to classify boys like this, and this isn’t even to get into how overwhelmingly white and skinny the beauty ideal for EVERY aesthetic is (when considering trends based off of ig or pinterest or tiktok)