It was when I started getting back into makeup again that I realized that makeup companies had begun adding skincare ingredients into their products. Hydrating primers, tinted SPFs, and skin tints were all products that probably already existed but gained more publicity due to the skincare boom.

Even once offices reopened and people started going on dates again, skincare was here to stay.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the phrase, “makeup is fake, skincare is real.”

People want to wake up looking beautiful. And many have a fear of what they call “cakey” foundation.

Revieve’s 2025 research names acne, aging, and dark spots as the three concerns U.S. consumers care about most. These were all problems that were previously solved by just putting on foundation. But now, people are searching for skin-deep solutions.

Skincare feels closer to mental health than makeup does, at least in how Gen Z talks about it. Makeup is a fun way to express yourself, but it’s still seen as a way to cover up your “flaws” instead of tackling the issues head-on. People love skincare because it isn’t meant to hide anything but leaves your face looking fresh and “real.” Unlike makeup or plastic surgery, there is a strong emphasis on health and wellness.

And of course, the chasing of pretty privilege also plays a role. In my essay “How Society Gate-keeps Pretty Privilege,” I mentioned how, “The first rule of pretty privilege is that it has to look like you’re not trying.

The most celebrated beauty aesthetic right now is the “clean girl” with minimal makeup, slicked-back hair, clear skin, and a simple, neutral outfit. The whole point is to look like you just woke up looking like that. You have to look like beauty is something that simply happens to you, and not something you have to work for.”

According to Mintel, people are judging beauty products less by results alone but based on how it acts as a part of their ritual. Color, texture, scent, and the ritual of massaging a serum into your face are all part of the skincare experience that you’re paying for when you choose to apply a product.

It would be a mistake for a brand to think they could be the next Proactiv by trying to carry the entire market.

Americans are such a diverse group of people, so it’s no surprise that our skincare needs are equally diverse.

People want a routine built around their own skin and not some generic ten-step system that’s just being sold to everyone (Revieve, 2025).

Gen Z is willing to try new products, mostly because of the nonstop skincare content they’re being exposed to all across social media. If you just scroll through these videos, you can see how skincare has expanded into so many different niches.

As I mentioned in “You Can’t Buy Cool,” Every few months, TikTok decides who you should be.

I also have to admit that gen-z’s fear if aging has contributed to the rise of skincare. Some believe that if they slather on enough anti-aging serums, they can stave off the aging process. However, the goal should be healthy skin. Looking more youthful/vibrant should just be one of the perks of having healthy skin but not the main goal

Having clear skin is now a sort of “wealth” signifier or sign that you have everything together. Class will always play a role in social phenomena like the skincare boom.

Many skincare brands have decided to position themselves with less of a clinical angle to be more in line with the youth’s interests. Gen Z loves trendy accessories, so some brands decided to reimagine skincare as an accessory. The Topicals colorful undereye patches come to mind as well as those cute pimple patches shaped like hearts or stars. These branding decisions also made skincare feel much more accessible to a wider audience.

I’m so glad that dermatologists have come online and educated the public about the fact that acne is usually the result of hormones and no amount of rubbing your face or slathering it with honey will change that.

For a long time, breakouts have been treated as a sign of poor hygiene and people were instructed to scrub harder, exfoliate more, and strip all the acne-causing bacteria off their faces. If you had acne, you were considered “dirty” and people had a hard time hiding the judgment on their faces when they scolded you for “not taking better care of yourself.” The ridicule was too much.

Grand View Research (2026) points to mask-related acne after the pandemic as one of the reasons people have become more educated about skin concerns and moved toward doctor-recommended and tested products.

Thanks to increasing skincare education, acne and other skin conditions are being treated without shame or judgment. Gen Z proudly wears their colorful pimple patches out in public which is just one of the ways people are becoming more free and open about their skin struggles.

As everyone probably already knows, Gen Z loves incorporating technology into their daily lives. Gen Z can be seen purchasing a skincare product because an app told them their hydration score isn’t high enough for them to get glass skin.

Health and beauty are merging together, causing beauty brands to compete with actual health providers as trusted sources of preventative care.

Consumers are now choosing products after doing their own research, and smart brands which has resulted in brands incorporating more data in their marketing. Unlike makeup, skincare has escaped the “vanity” label and now sits next to sleep and supplements on the list of requirements for a healthy lifestyle.

In my previous essay, “How the Clean Girl Killed the Glamorous Woman,” I wrote about how the clean girl aesthetic is still at the forefront and investing in skincare is one of the best ways to indulge in this aesthetic.

Just like makeup, skincare has quickly become sort of a hobby.

Dermatologists used to be at the forefront of skincare research but now everyone is posting product breakdowns, before-and-afters and reviews. And as skincare has become more of a hobby, brands are investing in aesthetic packaging.

We live in a time where many (especially the younger generation) are suffering from burnout and anxiety, so following a set routine every day/night can feel like the one thing in our lives we can actually control.

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles by the end of the year!

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References

Grand View Research. (2021). Skin Care Products Market Size | Industry Analysis Report, 2019-2025. In Grandviewresearch.com. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/skin-care-products-market

Mintel Announces 2026 Global Beauty and Personal Care Predictions | Mintel. (2025). Mintel. https://www.mintel.com/press-centre/mintel-announces-2026-global-beauty-and-personal-care-predictions/

‌revieve. (2025, June 30). Inclusive Beauty: Navigating the US Skincare Market’s Demand for Personalization. Revieve.com; Revieve. https://www.revieve.com/insider/articles/inclusive-beauty-us-skincare-personalization

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Some of us have been this woman, or watched someone else become her.

We’ve also wondered how someone so smart about everything else can be so clueless when it comes to love and relationships.

We assume success and intelligence can protect women from toxic relationships when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Women who quickly notice the red flags and decide not to even pursue the relationship get called “too picky” or impossible to please when the truth is that they’re just using discernment. Too often, women are told to “give him a chance.”

But if she “gives him a chance,” it can be too late to use her discernment. The truth is that discernment isn’t as effective once a person starts to matter to you because it causes you to stop using proper judgement.

Romantic attraction is rarely rational and instead runs on dopamine and oxytocin which are chemicals that reward pursuit and bonding regardless of whether the other person is a good or healthy match. People say that if your heart is racing and you feel butterflies in your stomach, then you have “chemistry” with the other person.

A 2005 study on crickets, summarized in PLoS Biology, found that female crickets are still attracted to the males that result in them having shorter lives and fewer resources.

In similar ways, women are attracted to a man’s confidence and charm, both of which toxic men manufacture to get what they want. Manipulative people are skilled at performing what women look for in a man, like grand gestures, intimacy, and constant, focused attention that makes her feel loved and cared for.

What we now know as love bombing used to get called “being swept off your feet.”

But by the time charm turns into control, the bond is already formed. I’ve always been told that judgment is most powerful before feelings develop.

This is why the advice to “just leave sooner” misses the point. Many women are dealing with men gaming to pass every “test” and overthrow her sense of discernment.

There’s also the issue of women thinking that they can “fix” men and start treating their man like a project.

Many women have been conditioned to believe that if they’re just patient and strong enough, the relationship can turn into something healthy. This type of woman ignored the red flags and tells herself that she understands him in a way that no one else can.

Successful women fail to understand that being a “problem-solver” doesn’t work the same way in romantic relationships. It can actually become a liability, because the more you invest in him, the harder it is to realize that nothing will change and it’s time to let go.

In 2013, Kate Ratliff and Shigehiro Oishi conducted a study on how a romantic partner’s success affects a person’s own self-esteem. Participants were falsely told that their partner had scored in the top or bottom percentile on a test. Men who believed their partner had done well showed lower self-esteem than men who believed their partner had failed, even though their own performance on the test hadn’t changed. Women showed no drop in self-esteem.

The researchers called it the zero-sum game hypothesis where some men subconsciously view “my partner succeeded” as “I am now less than her.”

A man carrying those feelings toward a woman who is successful, self-sufficient, and doing well for herself is not neutral about her success. In his subconscious, her wins register as his losses.

Feelings like this don’t show up on the first date but years into the relationship. It shows up as jealousy and constant correction. He goes quiet after her promotion instead of celebrating it and repeatedly makes comments that chip away at the very qualities that made her attractive to him in the first place.

Tina Turner is one of my favorite examples of a successful woman ho suffered at the hands of a controlling man.

She was only seventeen when Ike Turner first heard her sing. He made her his lead act, chose her stage name and dressed her in the clothes and jewelry to turn her into a star.

The marriage that followed included a wedding night spent at a brothel and beatings while she was pregnant. In an interview with People magazine, Tina Turner stated, “I was insanely afraid of that man.”

Her growing fame gave him less control over her, which only made his anger grow. Finally, in 1978, after years of what she called torture, she left and didn’t look back. Tina Turner speaking openly in 1981 helped the public understand that this type of violence happens to women with careers, money, and public lives, not only to women without options.

Talent, money, and fame did nothing to stop what was happening to Tina at home.

Being smart or successful doesn’t always mean that you’ll have a high self-esteem. Women can build careers that prove just how valuable they are and still be treated like trash in their personal lives.

This is what people miss when they say, “She’s smart and successful, so why doesn’t she choose better.”

A woman’s success can never protect the part of her that still doesn’t feel deserving of someone who treats her well.

Toxic men are able to hijack a woman’s life because some part of her still believes she has to earn love by constantly proving herself.

And let’s not pretend that people don’t lie.

Even the most intelligent people are susceptible to manipulation. Especially in romantic relationships, which require you to present yourself in a vulnerable state.

So let’s stop blaming the victims and start holding the manipulators accountable.

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

P.S. Thank you to everyone who helped me choose the title for this essay! It was 50/50 so I had to flip a coin :)

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles in a year!

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References

Bushby, H. (2023, May 25). How Tina Turner “broke the silence” on domestic abuse. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65673196

Why Bad Boys Always Get the Girl and Other Tales of Evolutionary Madness. PLoS Biol. 2005 Feb;3(2):e57. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030057. Epub 2005 Jan 25. PMCID: PMC544931.

(2021). In Apa.org. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-a0033769.pdf

Raj Persaud, D. (2013, September 6). Psychologists Find Female Success Is Bad for Romantic Relationships. HuffPost UK. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-raj-persaud/female-success-is-bad-for-romantic-relationships-_b_3878694.html

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Wiktionary defines a girl’s girl as, “A woman who supports, uplifts, and stands up for other women.”

Women were originally taught for a long time that other women were competition. We were taught that there was only one seat at the table and you had to fight for it. The “girl’s girl” pushed back on that.

But the internet’s version of a girl’s girl became to agree, validate, and never publicly criticize another woman.

If you say something, then you become the problem.

I’ve watched women defend a friend’s terrible boyfriend, a friend’s unfounded hatred for another person, and a friend’s bad decisions because they just couldn’t find a way to call them out without being seen as a “pick me” or a “hater.”

Every woman is scared of being told the words that sound harsher than any death sentence.

“You’re not a girl’s girl.”

But being a girl’s girl was never supposed to mean being agreeable. It was supposed to mean being dependable and trustworthy.

A trustworthy friend tells you the guy you’re talking to isn’t who you think he is. She offers a different perspective. She tells you the truth even if it puts a slight strain on your friendship. She wants the best for you.

An agreeable friend tells you whatever keeps you happy and comfortable even if it doesn’t reflect their true feelings.

People tend to become “agreeable” when they don’t feel safe enough to voice their opinions.

Unfortunately, the girls’ girl movement has made many women decide to become “agreeable” in their friendships.

Part of this pressure comes from how “public” modern-day friendships have come.

My mother’s friendships happened in kitchens, cars, phone calls that no one else could hear.

Mine happen partly on a social media feed.

We now have to deal with a level of scrutiny that was once reserved for celebrities and other public figures.

The cost of “appearing” anything less than fully supportive has gotten so high.

Even if you’re a girl’s girl, if it’s not reflected in your social media presence, then you might as well not be one.

Social media has made being a girl’s girl more of a performance.

@lindsiannI hate “girls girls”

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I watched a tiktok video where a woman says she isn’t a girl’s girl. She traced the term back to its origin as the opposite of “pick me,” which is the girl who puts other women down to get male approval. Most women, she admits, went through some version of being a pick-me as teenagers, testing out weird ways to be noticed before growing out of it. But then the term “pick me” stopped meaning “undermines other women” and started meaning “doesn’t perform solidarity exactly the way the internet wants.”

Being called a girl’s girl became the reward for compliance. In the video, she tells a story about a woman at a market who got asked where she bought her boots and said she’d rather not say. That clip got millions of views and the woman got dragged for not sharing where she got her boots. A clothing brand turned the moment into a marketing campaign about never gatekeeping.

All of this happened over a pair of boots. To be a girl’s girl, you must be generous, be warm, be endlessly supportive, never criticize another woman in public, always hype, always uplift, never be difficult. And this is just the patriarchy’s old expectations of women, repackaged and handed back to us as a feminist identity. And who enforces this? Not men, but women. We built a system where it is so easy to be cast out of the sisterhood.

This tiktoker is careful to say she isn’t arguing for a return to female rivalry. She’s not nostalgic for women tearing each other down for male attention. I love how she mentions that we corrected one problem so hard we built a new one that hides inside feminist language. Real support, she says, looks like sitting with a friend through month five of a breakup, not just the first week. It looks like telling her she’s wrong when she’s wrong. It looks like advocating for equal pay or reproductive rights.

The same women who use “girl’s girl” the most freely are often the fastest to turn around and tear another woman apart.

@akirameanzlightBeing a girls girl is just being a yes man. #adviceforgirls #girlsgirl #feminism

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I watched another video where a woman says that being a girl’s girl is just being a yes-man. I don’t completely agree with her but she mentioned how when you criticize a woman’s behavior, you risk getting labeled a pick-me or a woman hater.

Women have been shamed so much in the past that it feels like some people are overcompensating. They are supporting whatever a woman does, regardless of whether it’s good or not. She calls this a kind of arrested development. If your friends can’t tell you when you’re wrong, you don’t get to grow. You just get cheer-led by a group of people who are too afraid of losing you to be honest.

Women stay quiet about their friends’ mistakes not because they’re protecting their friend’s feelings but because they’re protecting their own place in the friendship. It’s seen as loyalty but it’s actually just self-preservation. I admit to doing this in friendships where I don’t feel safe enough to speak up.

Women have always been trained to keep the peace, to avoid conflict, and to smooth things over. Unfortunately, the girl’s girl movement didn’t undo that training. It actually justified it, thus making it worse.

Watching them together, I kept thinking about how neither woman is arguing against female solidarity. Both clearly want it. The woman in the second video mentions that liberation doesn’t come from letting someone do whatever they want without consequence. Liberation comes from holding yourself to the same standard you’d hold anyone else to.

Nobody wants to be the pick-me or mean girl. But we need to stop labeling conflict between women as inherently anti-woman. The friend who tells you the truth is doing something harder than the friend who tells you what you want to hear. She’s risking the relationship to protect you, which I believe is the true meaning of sisterhood.

A friendship built entirely on validation isn’t real. To me, a girl’s girl is a woman you can actually trust. You should be able to trust that they’re telling you the truth and actually want the best for you. It’s not just comments and heart-eyes on social media.

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles by the end of the year!

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References

girl’s girl - Wiktionary, the free dictionary. (2018). Wiktionary. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/girl%27s_girl

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTA2wFXad/

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTA2wgrYK/

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I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m not talking about bad-faith arguments, bigotry, or bullying.

Every post is treated as a fixed record rather than just a moment in time. As a result, people edit their thoughts before sharing them, imagining how a stranger years from now, with no context and no interest in giving them the benefit of the doubt, might view it.

Nuance doesn’t survive on social media, but complicated opinions need room to be explained. True discussions need qualifiers, follow-up questions, and someone on the other end who is actually listening instead of waiting for their turn to respond.

The most popular social media platforms these days give people a time or character limit. But most opinions worth having are not simple because they involve exceptions, experiences, and things that are only true some of the time. Unfortunately, platforms only reward certainty, speed, and inflammatory statements.

People are often forced to simplify their opinions, which results in a lack of substance.

Many have moved their real conversations into group chats, close-friends stories, or direct messages. People still have opinions, but now prefer private settings where the audience is chosen, small, and unlikely to hold it against them.

Posting publicly used to be a fun way to connect online and gain exposure to diverse opinions, but now too many people are scared of the consequences.

This is a huge loss for public discussion because it means disagreements that used to happen out in the open now mostly happen in private instead. But people are trying to protect themselves.

Many people are agreeing because they deem it “easier” than disagreeing. This is how consensus gets manufactured. Everyone is forced to have an opinion instead of admitting that they’re still processing things or just don’t know yet. Personally, there are very few opinions that I hold with complete certainty because there is so much research I would need to do on the topic.

Disagreement used to be a normal part of talking to other people. Someone could think another person was wrong about something and still like them, still want to hear them out, still assume they had reasons for believing what they believed.

But at some point, disagreement started being treated as a moral failure.

Part of the reason for this hostility is people utilizing bad-faith arguments, bigotry, or bullying and calling it “just an opinion” or the wildly misunderstood term “free speech.”

It can be hard to separate the ignorant from the abusive.

One unpopular opinion can undo years of someone’s reputation in a single afternoon. Public backlash campaigns are usually discussed in terms of famous people losing endorsement deals, but there is actually a much larger effect. The ordinary person who, after watching enough of these incidents play out, decides it simply isn’t worth saying what they actually think. This prevents them from meeting people who might challenge their beliefs and help them grow as a person.

What is lost when people stop arguing?

Real debate requires two things that are becoming harder to find. People willing to talk about what they believe in, and people who are willing to listen before deciding how to feel about it. In-person settings provide both of those things naturally, whether at a dinner table, on a long car ride, or in a conversation with friends. That type of exchange is worth having more of. Not everyone needs to agree in the end, but disagreement handled with curiosity instead of judgment is how people can actually work out what they think. I’m a big fan of the Unpopular Opinion events that are happening in D.C. because they create a safe and fun environment for people to share some of their most unique thoughts.

Now, I don’t know about some of these opinions, but I’m much more interested in hearing their arguments!

An opinion doesn’t grow wings by being kept private but by being said out loud to someone who might push back on it. Right now, most people have decided that pushback isn’t worth the risk, so they stay quiet, or they move the conversation into private chats, or they agree with whatever the loudest opinion in the room happens to be. I wouldn’t say that this is just cowardice, as it’s a reasonable response to an environment that punishes honesty and rewards silence. But it has a cost. A culture in which everyone is scared of sharing their opinion is a culture that has largely stopped the art of thinking.

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles by the end of the year!

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References

Somethingdifferent on Instagram

Livschreiber on TikTok

Motivora on Pinterest

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A friend of mine told me that she cried in a parking garage for 20 minutes before walking into work like nothing happened. She looked fine. She always looks fine.

We call people like her “high-functioning,” and we view it as praise. It conjures an image of someone capable and composed. Someone who has their life figured out while the rest of us are still Googling how to adult.

In psychology, “high-functioning” describes a person’s outward capacity, their ability to work, to meet obligations, and to appear stable, regardless of what is actually happening underneath. It says nothing about how that person feels as a whole.

Psychologist Carol Ryff spent decades arguing that while most well-being research asks whether people feel happy, satisfied, or are in a good mood, Ryff’s model, which is rooted in Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia, asks whether a person has purpose, whether they’re managing their life with a sense of mastery, whether they’re growing, and whether their relationships go deeper than surface-level.

Aristotle’s highest human good wasn’t happiness or the satisfying of appetites, but activities of the soul carried out in accordance with virtue. Feeling fine and functioning well were never supposed to be considered the same. That distinction matters because high-functioning behavior almost always scores high with surface-level metrics like being employed, always answering emails, dressing well, and always being cheerful or smiling.

However, eudaimonic well-being asks questions about meaning, self-acceptance, and whether you actually know and like the person you’re becoming every day.

Productivity and avoidance go hand in hand because when you’re always busy, none of the grief or unprocessed trauma has room to surface because you’re already onto the next task.

You can be falling apart, but once you’ve optimized your life, no one can even tell. Promotions get announced all over social media and workouts get posted to stories, but nobody shares the moments where they felt like giving up.

Many people were not taught how to process their feelings. Coping gets you through the day, while processing forces you to face your past instead of just “managing” your way past it.

A lot of high-functioning behavior is just the body staying in a state of hypervigilance, always slightly on alert and always ahead of the next demand. Some people describe it as a functional freeze where they are fully operational and technically present, but not actually inhabiting their own life.

The exhausted, perfectionist, high-functioning person ends up being isolated due to their own competence. They are stuck being the strong one. They are the one others lean on, without anyone realizing that they might need someone to lean on too. They end up feeling lonely.

Hyper-independence can feel like the only option, because asking for help means admitting your weakness or failure. But in a study of patients who had gone through serious trauma and illness, researchers found that healing was not a single event, but something that unfolded slowly over an extended period of time. Nobody healed on a set schedule.

A person can spend months holding everything together and then find themselves texting the ex who wrecked them, picking up the habit they swore off, or tolerating that friendship that is sucking the soul out of them.

As a society, we also tend to romanticize toxic situations and dress them up as “success stories.” Everyone loves the resilient woman who “handles everything.” She turns her pain into productivity and is always running towards something. It’s a compelling narrative but when resilience becomes forced, it starts working against the very recovery it’s supposed to represent. Vulnerability is actually what healing requires.

Most people don’t ask how you’re sleeping these days, how you’re handling grief, or how you’re holding everything together. People are only interested in your output. They want to know what you’ve accomplished.

A person can be quietly disintegrating and still be someone’s favorite employee, easy-going friend, or strong daughter.

Researchers studying healing defined suffering as the distress that occurs when a person’s sense of intactness feels threatened.

Healing isn’t efficient. It asks you to slow down in a world that rewards speed. It asks you to be unproductive on purpose. Healing asks you to recover the parts of yourself that you’ve been running away from.

Real recovery requires developing enough safety and trust to let someone into your world. You need to learn how to reframe your suffering instead of just suppressing it.

High-functioning people tend to feel guilty the second they stop moving. They need real rest and not the productive type of rest that has been rebranded as “self-care Sunday” and comes with an exhausting checklist.

My friend texted me a few weeks after that conversation. She’d started therapy for the first time, and said something that stuck with me.

“I’ve realized that I’ve just been pretending because that’s what I thought people wanted from me. I’ve decided to start thinking about what I want for me.”

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles by the end of the year!

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References

Ryff CD. Psychological well-being revisited: advances in the science and practice of eudaimonia. Psychother Psychosom. 2014;83(1):10-28. doi: 10.1159/000353263. Epub 2013 Nov 19. PMID: 24281296; PMCID: PMC4241300.

Scott JG, Warber SL, Dieppe P, Jones D, Stange KC. Healing journey: a qualitative analysis of the healing experiences of Americans suffering from trauma and illness. BMJ Open. 2017 Sep 13;7(8):e016771. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2017-016771. PMID: 28903969; PMCID: PMC5629625.

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The advertisement was for a weight-loss candy called Ayds and shows her husband lifting her off the ground.

The ad ends with someone at the next work get-together saying, “Wow, here comes Larry with his new wife.”

The entire premise of this ad rests on the fear that Shirley’s husband might choose someone else. This is one of the fears that has built the weight-loss industry. Although people are no longer taking Ayds to lose weight, this idea has been repackaged every decade into something that sounds more modern, clinical, and more like a choice you’re making for yourself.

“I just want to feel good in my body.”

Shirley didn’t lose weight because her knees hurt, or because her doctor was worried, or because she wanted to run a 5K. She lost weight because of fear and shame. She was terrified that she would lose her husband.

Ozempic (semaglutide), a medication developed for Type 2 diabetes, has become the cultural object of the decade. It’s making people thin. And fast! It’s a “magic shot” that is highly effective without the suffering thinness historically demanded (exercise and dieting).

It doesn’t matter what year it is, women’s bodies have always been seen as “problems” that need to be solved.

Shirley’s ad ran alongside another one in the same magazine.

“Why Be Fat?,” asked a magazine, with an image of a woman in a one-piece swimsuit. Then, a few pages later, a different ad reads, “Don’t Let Them Call You Skinny. A weight-gain supplement.”

Another magazine page states, “Men Wouldn’t Look at Me When I Was Skinny, But Since I Gained 10 Pounds This New, Easy Way I Have All the Dates I Want.”

These contrasting messages are being spouted out by the same magazines. Lose weight, gain weight. Be smaller, be curvier.

Society requires that a woman is always in the process of becoming a more acceptable version of herself and the market is always ready to offer the tools to get there.

But what I found most interesting about those old ads (and about Shirley’s in particular), is how openly they named the motive. There was no pretense about wellness or self-love or feeling your best. “I Didn’t Want to Lose Him so I Lost 59 Pounds.” It clearly spelled out that the reason was him not her.

Society has gotten more sophisticated about hiding this. Advertisers were savvy enough to ditch the male-centered language and capitalize on the female empowerment movement, so the messaging has been changed to, “I did it for me.”

And a lot of times, that’s true. Many women are de-centering men in their lives and are transforming themselves for their own approval and self-satisfaction. But even then, the comment sections of women who have lost weight are still filled up with comments like “your husband must be so proud” and “no wonder he can’t keep his eyes off you.”

Women have been trained to understand their bodies as something that exists in relation to male attention.

However, I don’t believe that the obsession with keeping a man is complete vanity. It’s a survival strategy that made sense for a very long time. It was made for a time when women couldn’t own property or bank accounts and couldn’t work most jobs without their husband’s permission. In the past, keeping a man wasn’t just about love but was a way to protect yourself so you wouldn’t end up with nothing.

Those legal inhibitions are mostly gone now, but the psychological ones still persist. Many women are still fearful that their bodies might cost them their relationships. They are constantly reminding themselves that a few extra pounds or a softer jaw could make him look elsewhere. This fear can be seen as “jokes” in the group chats, in the way women talk about their bodies, and in the dread that comes with the phrase “you let yourself go.”

Shirley Gallagher was terrified of being replaced and the weight-loss industry sold the antidote to that fear. It was Ayds in the sixties, SlimFast in the eighties, Weight Watchers in the nineties, Clean eating in the 2010s, and now it’s Ozempic.

If you scroll through any comment section on an Ozempic post and you’ll see things like, “She finally got serious, she took control of his health, and she stopped letting herself go.” There’s always an implication that the larger body was a moral failure, and the smaller one is proof of character.

Ozempic works by suppressing hunger at the neurological level. People don’t want to just be thin but also want to be the person who is able to keep their desire under control. Shirley mentions getting up in the middle of the night to make pancakes as evidence of her own “moral” failure.

How much of the way women manage their bodies is truly for themselves (health, feeling good, energy, longevity) or for a society that believes they will never be enough? How much of it is for the friends that might make fun of you or the man who might abandon you if he doesn’t like what he sees? Ozempic became popular because it offered a transformation that is fast, dramatic, and visible. People now have the ability to change their lives seemingly overnight.

In the end, Shirley got what she wanted. Her husband picks her up now, she says. Like one of the kids.

I don’t think Shirley was wrong to want to feel secure within her marriage. And I don’t believe the women injecting themselves with semaglutide are wrong for wanting to be thin in a society that will ridicule you for not meeting up to the “standards.”

The tragedy is that society is continuously feeding on that fear and somewhere, a woman is calculating how much she has to lose in order to make the people she loves stay.

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles by the end of the year!

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References

‌*All Images sourced from Pinterest

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I’ve seen everything from quite luxury, to the clean girl, to coastal grandmother and mob-wife.

Social media has tricked us into believing that you can purchase your way into becoming someone interesting.

I used to scroll through these aesthetics the way you read a menu when you’re not even hungry.

I’d watch a girl arrange her Aesop products on a marble shelf or flaunt the trendiest outfits and think, maybe that’s the missing piece. Maybe that’s the thing that pulls everything together.

The word “aura” has been thrown around social media a lot these days.

Merriam-Webster (n.d.) describes aura as, “a distinctive quality or atmosphere that seems to surround someone or something” or “the quality of being impressively cool, charming, or appealing.”

Being “cool” is seen as some secret club where you need certain products or an aesthetic to join.

But true coolness doesn’t come from owning a specific handbag or following an expensive skincare routine.

TikTok has done something genuinely strange to personal style. It didn’t just accelerate trends but industrialized the idea of having taste. Micro-aesthetics now have a lifespan measured in weeks. A sound goes viral, a look gets attached to it, major retailers sell you the look, and by the time you’ve ordered the pieces, the girls who inspired it have already moved on.

It’s hard to be an individualized version of yourself when your identity is mass-produced.

According to Merriam-Webster (n.d), to be cool is to be very fashionable, impressive, or appealing in a way that is generally approved of, especially by young people.

I remember watching a video where an influencer laid out the exact products you needed to achieve the “coolgirl” look. All of this supports the idea that being “cool “ is a checklist and that taste is transferable. Everyone thinks that they’re one Sephora run away from being “that girl.”

Cool, at its most honest, is about having a genuine relationship with the world around you and building your preferences around that. Good taste isn’t about owning the right objects but having a perspective sharp enough that your choices feel inevitable.

Objects carry meaning but they carry the meaning you bring to them. A vintage leather jacket might mean something different to someone who needs it to complete a certain aspect of their style vs. someone who bought it five minutes after it appeared on their For You page.

Women, specifically, are handed the impossible task of being authentic but in a way that is recognizable. The pressure to have a defined aesthetic is enormous, especially in the age of the personal brand.

I won’t deny that I’m a huge fan of creating Pinterest boards and looking for inspiration online. Identity is hard and having a framework is genuinely useful when you’re figuring out who you are. But there’s a difference between using an aesthetic as a starting point vs. a pre-filled template.

Style should be a byproduct of living, not a substitute for it. This includes reading widely, thinking independently, and having obsessions that don’t make algorithmic sense together.

The internet wants you to believe that you’re just one purchase away, one haul away, and one routine away from being cool. This is what keeps you scrolling.

Style is an accumulation of the media you consume, the places you go, how you perceive yourself, and the way you want to be perceived.

Personal style is the relationship with your own mind that is independent enough to generate preferences that are genuinely yours.

You can buy the aesthetic of an interesting life but you cannot buy the interesting life.

You can’t buy cool.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with engaging in different trends to find your personal style or just enjoying the feeling of wearing your favorite brands.

But don’t just be a customer. Become someone with taste.

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles by the end of the year!

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References

‌Definition of AURA. (n.d.). Www.merriam-Webster.com. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aura

‌Definition of COOL. (n.d.). Www.merriam-Webster.com. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cool

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It gets used the moment a woman declines something, asks for more, or simply decides her own needs matter.

The women who set limits, chase their ambitions, rest without asking permission, and refuse to perform endlessly for the benefit of others are called selfish.

But they also tend to be the ones who are doing the best.

Most women aren’t selfish when they need to be.

Neuroscience has its own theory about why women are selfish so infrequently. A 2017 study from the University of Zurich found that women’s brains work on a dopamine-based reward system that is more strongly activated by prosocial behavior than the male brain is. Prosocial behavior includes things like sharing, giving, and cooperating.

Still, that study’s own authors admitted they had no idea whether the difference was innate or purely cultural. Philippe Tobler, the lead researcher, said that “It is perfectly conceivable that the root of the differences here are only cultural, we simply don’t know.”

Angela Saini, author of Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, put it more bluntly. We teach girls to be kinder, gentler, more generous. We reward them for it. Then researchers find that women have stronger reward responses to generosity and call it biology. Of course they do. The reward system learns what it is taught.

So when a woman decides to be “selfish,” she’s doing something that runs against years of neurological conditioning.

She is told that she acts unavailable, difficult, or cold.

Society views her as being “rude.”

But women need to be selfish in order to survive.

The “selfish” woman doesn’t run herself to the ground just to avoid disappointing people.

She takes steps to avoid burnout.

Anna Malles, writing for In Session Psych, described the various roles/tasks that can lead to burnout. Many women are caregivers, managing households, navigating demanding jobs, and sometimes doing all three simultaneously. The only thing saving women from the full collapse of this heavy weight is the willingness to say no, to rest without justification, and to protect time that belongs only to them.

The selfish woman is called selfish precisely because she refuses to let herself be consumed. She is seen as withdrawing something she was expected to give freely. But by being selfish, she is trying to keep herself intact.

Set a firm limit with someone and watch how quickly they can readjust.

When you say no, you’re training the people around you to learn your boundaries. You can’t always be upset at people for asking so much from you when you haven’t even communicated your needs.

Unlike popular belief, the woman who can’t say no isn’t admired. Most times, she isn’t even appreciated. She is just used.

Professor Lisa Downing’s book Selfish Women examines exactly this pattern. She writes that throughout history, women have received the message that they’re not supposed to prioritize themselves. Understood primarily as daughters, mothers, partners, and caretakers, women have never been imagined primarily as individuals. Downing’s argument is that the inability to conceive of women as self-interested individuals is a failure to conceive of women as people at all.

Women have desires that exist independent of their relationships.

The “selfish” woman isn’t constantly auditioning for love.

She doesn’t reshape herself into something more palatable, agreeable, and convenient, in hopes that someone will decide she is worth keeping. She knows what she wants from a relationship.

She leaves when something stops working. Not after the fifth conversation about it and not after she has given it one more year and one more chance and quietly swallowed her own unhappiness to avoid the discomfort of an ending. She leaves.

People might call her cold and unfeeling.

But the truth is that she refuses to subscribe to the sunk cost fallacy.

She doesn’t stay in relationships that drain her just because she is terrified of being alone.

She understands that a woman without a partner isn’t a failure.

She knows that relationships are only worthwhile if they make your life better than it was before.

Loneliness doesn’t scare her the way it scares someone who has never learned to enjoy their own company.

She picks partners the way the “selfish” woman picks everything else, based on what she actually wants, not just on who will have her.

Ambition is often seen as a form of selfishness.

Applying for the job you want, asking for the project with visibility, making the bold move, and delaying starting a family so you can focus on school/career/goals.

This is because ambition requires a willingness to put your own goals above the social harmony that women are trained to maintain. The woman who doesn’t wait for permission, who doesn’t hide herself to seem less threatening, and instead goes after whatever she wants is described as aggressive, “too much,” or having forgotten her place.

Women should be allowed to make decisions based on personal alignment rather than emotional obligation.

Being feminine shouldn’t always equate to being self-sacrificing.

The truth is that the selfishness that has supposedly “disqualified” some women from womanhood is exactly what put them in power.

The woman who pursues what she wants, unapologetically, regardless of who finds it inconvenient, tends to get further than the woman who is constantly waiting for permission and validation.

Selfish women will always win financially.

She negotiates. She asks for a promotion. She applies for the high-profile project. She makes herself visible in the rooms where decisions are made about who moves up and who stays put.

And this is how she gains power.

A woman who doesn’t depend on others to fund or decide the direction of her life is a woman who cannot easily be controlled. She doesn’t tolerate bad conditions just because she can’t afford to leave.

She’s not waiting for other people’s approval because she knows who she is and what she’s capable of.

Lisa Downing states that if we insist that women cannot be individuals and that any self-interested woman is a failed woman, then we are effectively saying that women are not people.

Knowing your value doesn’t mean being arrogant. It’s the result of time spent with your own preferences, your own standards, and your own sense of what you will and will not accept. It requires the kind of self-attention that is called navel-gazing when a woman practices it and self-awareness when a man does.

People liking you is not more important than you liking yourself.

Selflessness, as a feminine ideal, actually requires women to give up their sense of self.

Selfish women win because they aren’t so focused on being one of the “good” ones that they forget to live a life they are proud of.

She asks for things. She rests when she needs to. She says no. She goes after what she wants.

She can be called difficult, demanding, cold, and selfish. But in the end, she wins.

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles by the end of the year!

Subscribe now

References

Birmingham, U. of. (2019, May 31). Selfish Women revisits the perennial question of “what women want” and argues that it may well be nothing more than the opportunity to be selves. University of Birmingham. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news-archive/2019/selfish-women-revisits-the-perennial-question-of-what-women-want-and-argues-that-it-may-well-be-nothing-more-than-the-opportunity-to-be-selves

Davis, N. (2017, October 9). Stereotype that women are kinder and less selfish is true, claim neuroscientists. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/09/stereotype-that-women-are-kinder-and-less-selfish-is-true-claim-neuroscientists

‌Warshauer, N. (2021, March 17). Women’s Mental Health Starts With Being Selfish. In Session Psych. https://insessionpsych.com/womens-mental-health-starts-with-being-selfish/

‌*All Images sourced from Pinterest

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It has 2.3 million views. The comments are full of affirmations. Because this is everyone’s goal. Protect your energy. Protect your peace. Invest in the soft life.

I’m not opposed to rest or peace, but I feel that there’s a bigger conversation to be had regarding this “soft life.”

The soft life aesthetic has become one of the defining visual languages of our generation. At its core, it promises a life of ease, comfort, and abundance.

Linen sheets, relaxing mornings paired with small sips of coffee/matcha, financial freedom, and the quiet confidence of a woman who doesn’t t have to rush.

It’s a beautiful image. But it’s also a dream that requires a very long, very unglamorous journey to achieve. Wanting the soft life means understanding that comfort is a byproduct of stability and not a replacement for effort.

The vision boards and “abundance mindset” content led many to believe that wanting something hard enough, loudly enough, and aesthetically enough might be sufficient enough to attract it.

We have been taught that if you dress the part and post the part, then the part will eventually come to you. I don’t disagree because I’m a firm believer that the universe rewards those who perform readiness. But you still need to put in the work.

Some of us are waiting to be discovered.

I’ve seen this in a lot of women I admire. Talented, creative, genuinely compelling women are just waiting. Waiting to be noticed by the right person, waiting for an opportunity to land in their inbox, waiting for someone to pull them out of obscurity and into the life they deserve.

The belief underneath all this waiting is that their talent is self-evident.

They believe their work speaks for itself (and oftentimes it does!).

They believe that grinding, networking, sending emails, learning new software, and showing up to events are somehow beneath them. Or even worse, unnecessary.

Too many people believe in the myth of discovery.

We hear about the singer who was found at a gas station or the model spotted at a mall. We don’t hear nearly as much about the thousand auditions that preceded the discovery, or the years of building a presence that made being discovered even possible.

Being talented isn’t enough. Wanting it isn’t enough. And waiting will not get you anywhere.

Some women know they need to grow, but they refuse to. They’re in their feelings about the algorithm. They’re frustrated that their content isn’t performing. They know their industry is changing but they’ve decided that adapting is a form of selling out. They need to learn how to use a new tool, a new platform, or a new approach but they resist it because learning feels like an admission that what they already know is not enough.

I admit to falling into this trap! I’ve failed at many projects/ventures because I wanted to skip learning the skills that were needed to succeed. But success is rarely quick. It’s very important to build a strong foundation first.

Realizing that you need to learn something new to succeed is very humbling. Networking, for many introverts and quiet achievers, can feel fake and exhausting. Putting yourself in a room where you’re the least experienced person requires a kind of ego death that not many people talk about.

But research tells us that effort, adds value, both to the outcome and to the person doing it. Writers for Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2018) reviewed evidence showing that working hard on something tends to make us value it more, not less. An example is the IKEA effect, which is the satisfaction that comes from assembling a piece of furniture. It reflects the satisfaction that comes from achieving something through your own hard work. Mountaineers love climbing precisely because it demands everything from them.

But we need to remember that effort is not just a means to an end. The work we do shapes who we become in the process. Refusing to learn that new skill doesn’t protect you in the long run. It just keeps you exactly where you are.

Behaviors don’t occur in a vacuum. The soft life aesthetic didn’t emerge from nowhere. A generation of women watched their mothers grind themselves into illness, resentment, and lives that were “full” but joyless. The soft life also became popular because it challenged the “hustle culture” that had been sold to us by online girlbosses.

But we must separate the valid need for rest and boundaries from the superficial desire to bypass the hard work of building a meaningful life. An aesthetic should never become a substitute for actual hard work and vision boards should not replace real action.

“Protect your energy” but also be open to taking risks that can catapult you into a life you could have never imagined.

We can all see it in the content. The women who have built the stable career or invested in their business move differently. They don’t need to spend much time performing softness because they’re too busy living it. And when you listen to them talk about how they got where they are, the story is rarely one of manifestation alone.

They spent years showing up, sitting in rooms where they felt out of place, and living a life that was both uncertain and “unglamorous.”

In Tamera Darden’s article, “How did I manifest my current job? I got my 🍑 up and worked!(but really)” (2026), she mentions that, “(work + visibility)*luck = manifestation.”

True manifestation includes putting in the work. But it doesn’t stop there. You need to go out and make yourself visible. You need to let people know who you are and give them a reason to want to be part of your world. And of course you need a little bit of luck!

Every successful person I know has used this formula in some shape or form.

And I suggest you go and read Tamera’s article. It’s a very inspiring read!

A genuine “soft life” isn’t created by escaping reality through a screen or online purchase (this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t indulge in these things, though. Everyone needs the little joys in life!).

We all dream of building a life we don’t constantly need to escape from but to do that, we’ll need to invest in the seasons of our lives that look nothing like a TikTok.

You need to invest in the mornings you wake up before you want to because the work requires it. The conversations you have to initiate even though initiating is uncomfortable. The new skill you learn that you wish you had learned earlier.

Wanting rest is valid. Wanting peace is also valid. Wanting a life that doesn’t grind you into dust is one of the most normal things a person can want.

But the algorithm only shows us the highlight reel.

The female founder whose business went viral had been perfecting her brand positioning until it resonated with consumers.

The creator whose aesthetic looks effortless spent months learning software, rewriting captions, and posting into the void before they found their audience.

The writer whose book is on the bestseller’s list had faced hundreds of rejections before being picked up by a publisher.

When we model our expectations on the finished product rather than the process, we start to believe that struggle is a sign we are doing something wrong.

However, it is almost always a sign we’re doing something real. It means that we’re doing the real work!

The women who are thriving didn’t just stumble into their newfound stability. They followed their vision and built it, day by day.

Many were met by disappointment.

And many failed.

But the “winners” kept on going anyway.

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles by the end of the year!

Subscribe now

References

Darden, T. (2026, May 26). How I manifested my current job? I got my 🍑 up and worked!(but really). Substack.com; Creative Ambition. https://iamtameradarden.substack.com/p/how-i-manifested-my-dream-reality

Inzlicht M, Shenhav A, Olivola CY. The Effort Paradox: Effort Is Both Costly and Valued. Trends Cogn Sci. 2018 Apr;22(4):337-349. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2018.01.007. Epub 2018 Feb 21. PMID: 29477776; PMCID: PMC6172040.

‌*All Images sourced from Pinterest

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We’ve all had that moment where we looked at someone else’s life, their career, their relationships, or their standard of living, and felt a quiet sense of defeat. It’s easy to label their reality as “unrealistic” for ourselves and view their success as just inherent privilege or luck.

But these are all self-limiting beliefs.

And when choosing between the scarcity mindset vs. the abundance mindset, I would rather choose abundance.

If someone else has achieved it, then it exists within the realm of human possibility.

In science, the term “proof of concept” means that a theory can function in the real world and not merely on paper. Human achievements are the same.

“Nothing is unrealistic if other people have it.”

This doesn’t mean that everything is equally available to everyone. After all, things like privilege and timing definitely play a factor in opportunities and success.

But the existence of someone else’s success means that THING you want to achieve is possible.

Someone, somewhere, has already done that “thing” you are convinced is impossible for you.

I’ve spent so much of my life focusing on what is “possible.” I used to think that being realistic is a sign of maturity and that people who have big dreams were just being childish. But your belief in yourself actually holds a lot of power.

When we look at the women who have done remarkable things, we’re always so focused on the finished version. Nobody really thinks about the journey because it isn’t always as exciting and aesthetic as we might think.

We see the outcome of her hard work and forget that there was ever a process.

We maintain our comfort zones by assuming that successful people possess a magical, unreplicable quality, but this is only to protect our ego.

We tell ourselves that all the people who have the things we want in life are uniquely talented, uniquely resilient, or uniquely blessed.

This narrative absolves us of responsibility towards our futures because it tells us that if success requires a gift we were not born with, then our inaction is not a choice, but just “fate.”

But while our personal circumstances might be holding us back, we can work on building up the qualities that will help us build the lives we want. We should practice focus, strategy, consistency, and resilience.

That successful woman who is living your dream life had to navigate a learning curve. She overcame self-doubt. She made deliberate trade-offs, said difficult no’s, and sat with uncertainty long enough to outlast it.

Rihanna didn’t just walk into a boardroom and announce she was launching a beauty empire. She started out building a music career and gaining influence. She probably wasn’t even planning on starting a beauty brand when she first entered the entertainment business. But then she saw women like her being ignored by an industry that couldn’t be bothered to make a foundation in their shade. This led to her launching Fenty Beauty with 40 foundation shades (an idea that legacy brands had dismissed as unprofitable). And Rihanna made $100 million in the first few weeks which proved that the demand was there. TIME Magazine called it one of the best inventions of the year and the beauty industry scrambled to catch up overnight.

Sara Blakely cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose because she wanted her white pants to look better. That is the whole origin story of Spanx. With just $5,000, she built a billion-dollar company when years before, she had been selling fax machines door-to-door.

Barbara Corcoran started her real estate company with just $1,000 and later sold it for $66 million.

Lauren Simmons became the youngest full-time female trader on Wall Street and the second Black woman to ever trade on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in its 229-year history.

Pat McGrath began her career in the 90’s as a beauty director and spent years doing makeup on the runways before launching her own brand in 2015. It became one of the most popular beauty labels in the world (The Zoe Report, 2025).

These are all real women who struggled with set gaps, dismissiveness, and closed doors.

Uchenna Ngwudo founded Cee Cee’s Closet NYC when she noticed that there was a lack of empowering, culturally rooted spaces in fashion for women like her.

None of these women looked at a crowded market and said, “Someone else will do it.” Their frustrations with the market became the starting point for their vision.

We often look at what someone has achieved and immediately start comparing.

They had more money, more connections, a better education, a more “beautiful” body, lived in a better city.

But while it’s true that the starting line isn’t always the same, that shouldn’t stop us from trying.

CNBC reported that despite the obstacles women face in business, like the gender pay gap and uneven access to capital, the number of women running VC firms, leading Fortune 500 companies, and building their own ventures is more than ever before (Smith, Sauer & Liu, 2023).

This is the result of women who didn’t let their dreams remain as just “unrealistic” goals they never tried to pursue.

Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, talked about what it meant to grow up in an environment where women’s capabilities were assumed rather than questioned. She described watching her best friend’s mother co-run a lab as an equal with her husband, and not realizing until college that some people didn’t think women could do everything a man could. The community she was surrounded by had shaped what she believed was possible (CNBC, 2023).

Inspiration vs. Comparison

Everyone has different resources, different timing, different access, and different circumstances.

You shouldn’t look at what someone else has achieved and assume you’re behind schedule.

Instead, they should inspire you to look at what they’ve achieved and realize that it can be done.

Vera Wang didn’t launch her bridal fashion empire until she was 40. She had spent decades as a figure skater and then as a fashion editor before building her iconic brand.

Sophia Amoruso built Nasty Gal into a multi-million-dollar business, watched it collapse into bankruptcy before rebuilding herself with Girlboss Media. She couldn’t have been successful without learning from her “failure.”

So when you become inspired by a female founder, creator, or professional, you shouldn’t try to copy their exact timeline. Putting too much pressure on yourself will only cause you to give up before your ideas have the room to mature.

Instead, you should study what made them success stories and figure out which parts you can adopt in your own life.

Deciding that your dreams are “unrealistic” is just a defense mechanism.

It’s a way to protect yourself from the vulnerability of trying and falling short because failure is only possible when you actually try.

Remaining safely in the realm of the “impossible” guarantees that you’ll never be disappointed, but it also guarantees that you’ll continue living a life of “what ifs?”

The world is overflowing with evidence that your desires are valid and achievable.

Every woman who has built the life she envisioned is proof that.

Do your goals match your identity?

Most goals don’t feel unrealistic because they’re actually out of reach, but because you haven’t yet become the type of person who can reach them.

Who you believe yourself to be determines what you allow yourself to try, and more importantly, what you allow yourself to keep trying after it doesn’t work the first time.

Sara Blakely has spoken about a motivational recording her father gave her when she was 16. It is a tape that describes becoming a “no-limit person.” The message was simple: external roadblocks cannot stop you if you refuse to internalize them as evidence about what is possible.

She carried that outlook into every rejection, every closed door, and every manufacturer who turned her down because he didn’t understand the product.

When you see someone who has what you want, the useful question is not “why do they have it, and I don’t?”

The useful questions are, “Who did they have to become in order to build it? What did they have to believe about themselves when there was no external evidence to support that belief? What did they have to keep doing on the days when nothing was working?”

We tend to encounter other people’s success once they’ve reached the top.

Rarely do we know what they went through behind the scenes.

Alicia Grande grew up in a financially struggling household. When she launched Grande Cosmetics in 2008, she was starting with a lash serum, a product that wasn’t yet on most people’s radar at that time. She has since expanded into brows, mascara, hair care, and lip products. But people only hear about the brand, not the decade of building (The Zoe Report, 2025).

Jess Hunt launched REFY Beauty in 2020 with Jenna Meek. It was completely self-funded. In the early days, Hunt was the product person, the customer service person, and the social media person. When the brand grew, she stepped back from the things she wasn’t best at and let others take them over. This helped the company to further scale (The Zoe Report, 2025).

You need to ask yourself what it means to use someone else’s success as a guide.

What did they do when their original approach didn’t work?

They most likely didn’t give up.

Treat others’ success as proof that the path exists but don’t expect that to mean that your path will look identical.

Babba Rivera made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for marketing before she ever founded her hair care brand Ceremonia. It became the first Latinx woman-owned hair care label to land on Sephora’s shelves.

When asked about her journey, her advice was, “don’t underestimate your own superpowers.” She said that women often undervalue the insight they bring because they’re in a rush to fit a more traditional idea of what a founder looks like (The Zoe Report, 2025).

Most people treat ambition like something private.

They don’t want to share their ambitions until they’ve already succeeded.

There’s a lot of fear and shame that comes with being an ambitious person.

And that shame is what really holds many people back, especially women.

What we think we can achieve is shaped by what we have seen.

What we believe is possible is shaped by who we have seen do it.

This is why representation matters.

When you see someone who looks like you, comes from where you come from, or starts with what you have, achieve something, you start to believe that you can do that too!

Instead of waiting for permission or certainty, you start asking different questions.

What did she have to be open to learning? What did she do when things weren’t working out? Where did she go to find people who took her seriously?

Lauren Simmons was once told that she was being too ambitious. She was also told that she lacked a clear direction. But she ignored those words. Instead, she focused on figuring out what she liked, what she was passionate about, and kept it moving (CNBC, 2023).

But ambition alone isn’t enough.

You need to learn how to turn your ambitions into reality.

You need to study.

Ila Corcoran, founder of Sengo, described her experience in private equity as an education in exclusivity. As a Black woman, she saw firsthand how wealth-building opportunities were gatekept from certain groups and her response was to build something that addressed this directly (Causeartist, 2026).

Instead of thinking about all the obstacles that are preventing you from reaching your goals, you should tell yourself, “What can I learn from how they did it, even if my starting point is different?”

Embrace the process

The hard truth that many don’t want to accept is that you can’t achieve your goals without embracing the process. Too often, I see people viewing the process as some sort of punishment instead of the learning opportunity it is.

Rihanna couldn’t launch Fenty Beauty the first day she became a public figure. She spent years studying the industry, building a name for herself, and learning how to do business in a way that would eventually make Fenty not just successful but transformative.

The women I’ve mentioned in this essay didn’t succeed just because they had more certainty than everyone else but because they just kept on going.

They adapted what was working, let go of what wasn’t, and refused to treat difficulty as impossibility.

You should look at what other people have built and feel a sense of relief.

Nothing is unrealistic if other people have it.

Start treating other people’s success as an inspiration/guide rather than a sign of your own limitations.

And ask yourself, “Am I willing to do what it takes?”

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles by the end of the year!

Subscribe now

References

Fetto, F. (2020, April 6). How Fenty Beauty Changed The State Of Play In The Industry. British Vogue; Vogue. https://www.vogue.co.uk/beauty/article/rihanna-fenty-beauty-diversity

Smith, M., Sauer, M., & Liu, J. (2023, March 23). Barbara Corcoran, Lauren Simmons and other powerful women in business on their best advice and secrets to success. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/23/5-powerful-women-share-their-best-kept-secrets-to-success.html

These Women Beauty Brand Founders Are Shaking Up The Industry. (2025, March 21). The Zoe Report. https://www.thezoereport.com/beauty/women-beauty-brand-founders-trailblazers

7 Female Founders Who Turned Personal Stories into Conscious Brands. (2024, December 3). Causeartist.com. https://www.causeartist.com/blog/female-founders-personal-stories-conscious-brands

‌*All Images sourced from Pinterest

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The comment read something like, “I don’t mind Black women in movies. Just not in this role.”

The role in question was Helen of Troy. She is a character described as the most beautiful woman in the world with “a face that launched a thousand ships.” She is a mythological figure, a symbol, and an idea.

And the commenter had decided, without hesitation, that a Black woman could not be that “idea.”

This wasn’t an isolated opinion. It was the same logic used when Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel. The same energy that met Francesca Amewudah-Rivers when she walked onto a West End stage to play the role of Juliet.

I was originally going to write an article about the backlash Lupita Nyong’o is receiving for her role in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. But while doing research, I remembered the abuse Halle Bailey and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers had also faced from online commenters.

And then I realized something all of these women had in common.

These women weren’t just in the movie or the play.

They were the leads.

People hate black female leads.

I keep on seeing the same sentiment over and over again when it comes to black female leads.

Not her.

Not as the lead.

Not as the beautiful one.

Not as the one we center the story around.

When a Black woman is cast as the lead in a major film or television series, the internet’s reaction is often swift, coordinated, and unmistakably hostile.

Review-bombing campaigns, viral hate threads, and algorithmic pile-ons have become a predictable ritual and one that rarely greets white leads with the same ferocity.

The pattern is too consistent to dismiss as just a “coincidence.”

Black female leads are met with outrage framed as criticism.

When a Black woman is cast as the lead, there is always concern over “casting choices” or “staying true to the source material.”

Modern fandoms weaponize “lore” to mask their misogynoir.

Until platforms, studios, and audiences reckon honestly with this dynamic, Black women will continue to pay the professional and psychological price for simply existing in roles they’ve earned.

Black Women Are Being Watched But Not Seen

People are only comfortable with certain types of “representation” when it comes to black women in the media.

The wise best friend. The sassy coworker. The disposable romantic interest. The side character who shows up to deliver a line that moves the plot forward before completely disappearing.

Black women have always been allowed to exist in stories. Just not at the center of them.

When Lupita Nyong’o was cast as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, the backlash was immediate.

Elon Musk posted that Nolan was an “anti-white racist” who had lost his “integrity” for casting a Black woman to play Helen.

The logic of him and many others was that Helen of Troy was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world. And a Black woman cannot be that.

Others argued Lupita Nyong’o shouldn’t play Helen of Troy because she isn’t Greek, but let’s be honest, that same “historical accuracy” argument wouldn’t be weaponized against a white actress.

Nyong’o responded to her critics in a calm and careful manner. She reminded people that The Odyssey is a mythological story. Helen of Troy was not a real person. She is a character in Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad.

Lupita Nyong’o said she was not spending her time constructing a defense, because “the criticism will exist whether I engage with it or not.” She spoke of the film’s ambition which is a cast “representative of the world,” occupying what she called “the epic narrative of our time.”

It’s disappointing that she had to justify the existence of her face in the role.

When Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel in Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid in 2023, the hashtag #NotMyAriel trended on social media. Racist trolls flooded the internet. Her casting as a fictional mermaid who lives under the sea, was treated as an affront.

For these viewers, the color of her skin was treated as a direct violation of their childhood nostalgia.

Three years later, Bailey reflected on the experience with a grace that should not have been required of a young actress who just wanted to play a role.

She told The Independent that it was “actually freeing” to be in the middle of that conversation.

She said she learned to “block out the noise.”

She talked about going out into nature to stay grounded. “I love feeling small, realizing that the world is so big and beautiful and I’m just a tiny, tiny part of it.”

And then there is Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, who was cast as Juliet alongside Tom Holland’s Romeo in a West End production in 2024. The abuse began the moment the casting was announced. It did not stop when rehearsals started. It did not stop during the run. She received death threats and hate mail arrived at the theatre. She did not feel safe at work.

“There were many days where I didn’t know how I was going to get through it,” she told The Stage. “The flurry of abuse was sustained throughout the whole job.”

She described being on the minimal set, under the close-up camera, her face blown up on the theatre screen, and having to perform vulnerability while that same face had been the target of a months-long campaign of hatred.

People watched her. Audiences came to see her. Critics reviewed her.

She was nominated at the Black British Theatre Awards.

And yet she was, at the same time, unseen, reduced to a symbol of something that threatened people, a problem to be solved, a question that many felt comfortable answering with violence.

The Pressure to Be Flawless Just to Be Acceptable

When Bailey’s grandfather shared stories of the racism he had endured in his lifetime, he told her, “You don’t understand what this is doing for us, for our community, for all the little Black and brown girls who are going to see themselves in you.”

It was beautiful, but it also carried a heavy weight.

We need to discuss the immense pressure placed on Black women who take on high-profile roles. They are not just playing a character. They are playing on behalf of a community. Every performance is a referendum. Every misstep becomes “evidence” that they didn’t deserve the opportunity to share their talent.

Every bit of backlash has to be endured not just personally, but publicly, and gracefully, because the moment a Black woman responds with anything other than composure, the story shifts from what was done to her to how she reacted.

Halle Bailey spoke about this when she noted that Beyoncé once told her: “I never read my comments. Don’t ever read the comments.”

That advice, passed down from one Black woman in the industry to another, isn’t just some “quirky” piece of celebrity wisdom but a survival strategy built from lived experience.

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers described what it means to move through life in a Black body, hyperaware that more visibility almost always invites targeted harassment.

What she was unprepared for, she said, was how long it went on, and how she had to navigate it while still showing up to do the job.

“It was four months of battling against this energy.” Four months. While performing Shakespeare. On a West End stage, in front of live audiences.

This is the unspoken expectation placed on Black female leads: do your job impeccably, receive the hatred without breaking, and come out the other side with your dignity intact and your words carefully chosen.

This is why Black women and girls must have allies!

When the Disney+ series Percy Jackson and the Olympians cast young actress Leah Jeffries as Annabeth Chase, a wave of racist backlash erupted online from fans upset that a Black actress was playing a character described as white in the books.

According to Variety (2022), Author Rick Riordan stepped up firmly to defend his casting choice, writing that the criticism amounted to plain racism. He argued that judging Jeffries’ suitability for the role “solely and exclusively on how she looks” is exactly that. He praised the young actress directly, writing that she “brings so much energy and enthusiasm to this role” and that she “will be a role model for new generations of girls.”

Riordan also made clear the decision was his own, telling critics to “take it up with me,” and strongly condemned the online harassment of a child, stating that “bullying and harassing a child online is inexcusably wrong” and demanding it stop immediately. Both Riordan and Disney conducted the casting search under a nondiscrimination policy committed to diverse, inclusive casting.

As a black girl who spent her childhood obsessed with the Percy Jackson books, Rick Riordan’s support for this young, Black actress made me emotional. He could have just stayed quiet and focused on working on the show.

It means a lot when the author of one of your favorite series stands up for someone who looks like you.

The actress depicting Annabeth Chase in the original Percy Jackson movies was white.

Rather than just “pushing diversity,” it’s clear that Riordan wished to reimagine the narrative and approach of his story and characters.

Rachel Zegler, is not a Black woman but she faced similar backlash because of her Hispanic heritage. People claimed that she should not have been allowed to play Snow White due to her darker complexion. This is another example of the online abuse that women of color deal with.

The roles that trigger the most intense public fury are always the ones where the lead lady is described as the most beautiful, innocent, and beloved.

These are the roles where audiences have decided (sometimes without realizing it) that the default is white. Snow White. Ariel. Juliet. Helen of Troy. These are not real women with detailed racial backstories. They are fictional characters and archetypes.

And the rage at seeing a Black woman or even a woman of color play these roles reveals the uncomfortable truth that beauty, in the cultural imagination, still has a color.

I saw a comment on social media that said that they didn’t mind black women or women of color in roles. They just didn’t want them in roles that depicted them as “snow white” (Snow White), “most beautiful woman alive” (Helen of Troy), and “beautiful young maiden” (The Little Mermaid).

But people need to understand that not every movie adaptation is meant to cater to them, and there are different adaptations for a reason.

Not every director is trying to shoot a movie that is a complete copy of the book.

Some directors are trying to capture a feeling, a theme, or make the story enticing to a completely new audience. An adaptation that changes the story’s setting, the race of a character, or even the ending is not a “betrayal” but a creative interpretation.

Think of how many versions of Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, or Dracula exist. They all look different, feel different, and have their own unique styles.

A movie doesn’t need to be a reflection of your personal experience with the source material. It only owes you a story, and sometimes that story just isn’t tailored for you specifically.

It’s Not Just Because They’re Black

It’s worth asking, when was the last time a Black man faced this level of coordinated, sustained online abuse for being cast in a role traditionally viewed as white, handsome, or heroic? Racism isn’t selective, but the specific, vicious, gendered nature of what Bailey, Nyong’o, and Amewudah-Rivers faced is truly distinct. This hate lives at the intersection of race and gender, and is rooted in a particular anxiety about Black womanhood.

The trolls are not simply resistant to racial diversity in casting. If they were, we would see equivalent fury directed at Black men playing heroes or romantic leads in blockbusters. We do not, or not with the same intensity, see the same coordinated hashtag campaigns, the same vitriol, the same flood of death threats sent to a theatre.

What seems to specifically enrage a certain segment of the internet is a Black woman being designated as the most beautiful, the most desirable, the most worthy of love and devotion within a story.

Leading women in these stories are objects of adoration. And the gatekeepers of that adoration have decided that Black women do not qualify. I recently wrote an essay where I described how society gatekeeps pretty privilege.

Black women are faced with the intersectional burden of confronting racial prejudice and the Eurocentric beauty ideals placed on women.

Amewudah-Rivers named this clearly: “For it to cause such outrage that I was cast in this role means we have a long way to go.”

She noted that she is not the first Black Juliet and will not be the last. But she also acknowledged the cost: her family was affected. The cast and crew were affected. She had to reckon with whether it was worth it, “this sustained feeling of duress.”

Worth it.

She used the phrase “worth it.”

That is what Black women in these roles are asked to calculate: whether being seen is worth being targeted.

Living the Dream, Navigating the Nightmare

In this publication, I write about self-discovery, about building the life you want, and about all the things I’m navigating about becoming the woman you’re meant to be.

I believe in all of that.

But I also think it would be dishonest to write about ambition and not acknowledge what it costs Black women to pursue it publicly.

Halle Bailey is a working actress and musician with a Disney lead to her name, Beyoncé’s mentorship in her back pocket, and a career that most people could only dream of. She is, by most measures, living the dream. And she is also someone who had to learn, at the beginning of her career, during what should have been a moment of pure joy, how to survive a coordinated international harassment campaign.

Lupita Nyong’o is an Academy Award winner. She has played iconic roles for over a decade (12 Years a Slave, Black Panther, Us, A Quiet Place, just to name a few). She is, by any reasonable measure, at the top of her field. And she is being asked, in the press cycle for a Christopher Nolan film, to justify herself.

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers had her West End debut and that is a HUGE milestone!

But she spent four months of it not feeling safe at work.

For a lot of Black women, the nightmare and the dream exist simultaneously. We don’t first build the dream life, and then navigate the opposition. We do both at the same time.

Halle Bailey described her community of women in the industry, Rachel Zegler, Zendaya, and Ariana Grande, who reached out during the worst of it.

“As women, I think we form a little protective bubble around each other, especially when we see a peer going through lots of opinions,” she said. “We all understand what a vulnerable place it is to be.”

That “bubble” is very protective and real. But it’s not the same as institutional protection.

The Jamie Lloyd Company condemned the abuse directed at Amewudah-Rivers in a public statement and said further harassment would be reported. But Francesca was still the one who had to show up every night. She was the one who said: “Safety has to be at the forefront. We can’t do our best work if we don’t feel safe.”

She called for broader industry-wide conversations and an infrastructure of support and not just representation on stage, but protection behind the scenes.

That call has not been answered loudly enough.

I keep coming back to that comment. “I don’t mind Black women in movies. Just not in this role.”

I think the commenter believed they were being reasonable. Measured, even. They weren’t saying they hated Black women. They were just saying: not here. Not as the beautiful one. Not as the lead. Not as the center of the story.

But that is the whole problem.

The roles they are being excluded from are the ones that thrust them into the spotlight.

They are the ones that say: this person matters. This face is worth the story. This woman is worth loving on screen.

Someone posted this question on the Oscars Subreddit: “To this day, halle berry is still the only black woman in history to win the best actress category. Will we ever see another black actress win this category again?”

Halle Berry won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for the 2001 movie Monster’s Ball.

A commenter replied, “Not for awhile. The Oscars will give Oscars to black actresses (and WOC in general) for Best Supporting Actress, but they are extremely hesitant to do so for Best Actress in a Leading Role…”

According to Gold Derby (2020), “Hattie McDaniel was the first Black woman to win an Oscar in 1940, but for the Best Supporting Actress category for Gone with the Wind.”

The only other non-white winner for Best Actress was Michelle Yeoh for her depiction of Evelyn Quan Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).

Can Black Women Ever Truly Win?

The Guardian (2026) published an article titled, “I was still black the next morning: Halle Berry says Oscar win didn’t change her career.”

Halle Berry, the only Black woman ever to win the best actress Oscar, found that her 2002 win for Monster’s Ball did little to transform her career prospects. She had expected a flood of new opportunities, but the volume of projects she was offered stayed roughly the same because

Hollywood remained deeply uncertain about how to market stories centered on people of color. Directors reportedly questioned whether casting a Black woman would require a fully Black cast, and worried that “Black movies don’t sell overseas.”

This was a mindset that kept doors closed despite her historic achievement.

Lupita Nyong’o faced a parallel frustration after her 2014 supporting actress win for 12 Years a Slave, finding that rather than being offered lead roles, she was repeatedly approached to play enslaved characters again.

Both of these women’s experiences reveal a systemic pattern in Hollywood where prestigious recognition for Black actresses does not translate into the expanded, varied opportunities that white winners typically receive.

Black women have always been told that our ambitions are welcome in the margins. That there are roles available, such as the supporting cast, the helpful neighbor, the wise friend, the abandoned love interest.

We are told that these roles are generous offerings.

We are told to be grateful.

The backlash against Halle Bailey, Lupita Nyong’o, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, etc., makes it clear what happens when Black women step out of those margins and into the center frame: the internet decides they need to be pushed back.

But we’re not going back.

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles by the end of the year!

Subscribe now

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References

Dixon, M. J., & Dixon, M. J. (2020, June 8). Black Oscar winners: Every actress, actor who won Academy Awards. GoldDerby. https://www.goldderby.com/gallery/black-oscar-winners-best-actress-actor/

Khomami, N. (2024, September 18). Black actor who faced abuse over role in Romeo & Juliet calls for industry-wide action. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/sep/18/black-actor-francesca-amewudah-rivers-racist-abuse-romeo-juliet-industry-action

Pilley, M. (2026, May 26). Lupita Nyong’o responds to racist backlash over Helen Of Troy casting in “The Odyssey.” NME. https://www.nme.com/news/film/lupita-nyongo-responds-to-racist-backlash-over-helen-of-troy-casting-in-the-odyssey-3947554

Rubin, R. (2023, March 13). Michelle Yeoh Makes Oscars History as First Asian Lead Actress Winner. Variety. https://variety.com/2023/film/asia/michelle-yeoh-oscar-win-first-asian-best-actress-1235544210/

Sharf, Z., & Sharf, Z. (2022, May 10). “Percy Jackson” Author Rick Riordan Slams Racist Backlash Against Leah Jeffries’ Casting as Annabeth. Variety. https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/percy-jackson-rick-riordan-racism-leah-jeffries-casting-1235263216/

Sharf, Z. (2026, April 6). Halle Bailey Explains Why “Little Mermaid” Racism Was Freeing. Variety. https://variety.com/2026/film/news/halle-bailey-little-mermaid-racism-freeing-1236709295/

‌Shoard, C. (2026, February 3). “I was still black the next morning”: Halle Berry says Oscar win didn’t change her career. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/03/i-was-still-black-the-next-morning-halle-berry-says-oscar-win-didnt-change-her-career

‌‌‌*All images sourced from Pinterest

Her content is warm. Her mission is simple. She wants women to feel seen, empowered, and safe.

And yet, she found herself at the center of a pile-on that left her crying in front of a camera, reading from a written statement just to make sure she could get the words out without breaking down.

I previously wrote an essay titled “tiktok has a jealousy problem” and I can’t help but see the parallels.

Once again, TikTok is attacking someone and tearing them down because they lack the understanding of one thing.

Nuance.

Paris stated, “There are truly few things that I hate more than being misrepresented,” and I relate to that awful feeling when people purposely misinterpret your character to push their own agendas or assuage their own insecurities.

So what exactly did she do wrong? That is a question a lot of people in the comments of her latest video were asking too.

I’d like to preface this by saying that I don’t agree with some of Paris’s takes. There are many instances where our opinions diverge.

But I still value her as a member of the online space and believe her voice deserves to be heard.

Society can only be healthy if we are willing to listen to and learn from differing perspectives.

Our thoughts and opinions are meant to evolve, not stay stagnant.

And we must challenge our beliefs every day!

I admire Paris’s intelligence, courage, and love of research.

She puts a lot of thought into her videos, which is what gives them value.

Paris’s content has always been centered on her lived experience as a Black African woman. When she started posting in 2024, her videos were rooted in essays and poems she had written about her personal life.

She never positioned herself as the spokesperson for feminism.

Her opinions were drawn from her own personal experiences.

The subjects she covered were intimate ones like body image, self-confidence, and dating.

But as her following grew, so did the expectations placed on her.

And when she did not explicitly address trans rights in her content, a narrative began to form in certain corners of the internet that she might be a TERF (a trans-exclusionary radical feminist).

This accusation was not new. By her own account, she had stated from the beginning of her TikTok career that she was not a TERF and that trans women were a part of her feminism.

But the comment section of her videos had attracted transphobic commentary that she had not been quick enough to remove, and in the minds of her critics, that silence was its own form of complicity.

The internet decided to attack her.

This isn’t the first time Paris has faced criticism.

She was previously ridiculed for identifying as an essayist despite being only 21 years-old. People thought she was too young to label herself as such (This made me ask myself, how old do you need to be before you can call yourself an essayist? How many awards do you need before you can identify as one?).

One thing people on TikTok will always do is make false equivalencies.

The difference between Paris and Andrew Tate is that her comment sections do not always reflect her ideology.

People feel free to share their own thoughts and opinions in her comment section, even when they don’t agree with her. I believe that this is because Paris has built a community of people who are the opposite of “yes-men.” They are not her “followers” but fellow thinkers who have found her platform to be a safe space to explore their opinions and ideas, no matter how unpopular they might be.

Paris has such a large platform that it is almost impossible to moderate it unless she pays some person or company to take care of it for her.

She already avoids reading her comments due to the anxiety it induces.

In relation to this, Paris stated, “I would like to make it clear that my lack of discussion on the subject was not coming from a place of bigotry, but a lack of feeling like I had the adequate life experience or perspective needed in order to meaningfully contribute to this discussion.”

I believe this is a very responsible perspective, especially in our current climate, where people are “teaching” about topics they only have a surface-level understanding of.

Paris was vulnerable in her response video.

She explained that she had made this video many times.

That she kept ending up in tears.

That she was struggling just to get the words out in a way that felt coherent.

She even apologized for reading from a written statement, explaining that writing was the medium she felt most comfortable with given the gravity of the moment.

She took accountability for the state of her comment section.

She acknowledged that her failure to moderate it had allowed harmful narratives to fester.

She apologized to anyone who had been made to feel unsafe.

She explained that her large following made it overwhelming to keep up with the flood of comments, and that she had sometimes had to step away from reading them entirely for the sake of her own mental health.

She did not excuse herself.

She just explained herself.

And she was clear, unambiguously, explicitly, and on record that she is not a TERF.

She believes in trans women.

She wants her platform to be a safe space for the entire gender spectrum.

But the criticism kept coming. And in her own section, commenters began debating whether her apology was even good enough, whether she was being sincere, whether the whole thing was performative (I HATE when TikTokers do this!! They accuse everyone of being performative).

As one user in the comment thread put it: this whole discourse proves her initial point.

There is something deeply ironic about a feminist creator being torn apart by people who claim to also be feminists.

Paris’s original content was about exactly this.

How women are silenced, scrutinized, and held to impossible standards.

How people wait patiently and eagerly for a woman to make a single misstep, so they can pounce.

When I first saw Paris’s videos, even before she blew up on TikTok, I remember thinking to myself, “These people are going to destroy her! Let me pray for her mental health.”

Any woman who shares strong opinions online will eventually be socially executed.

Paris herself said that she knew she would face something like this.

Many of the TikTokers going hardest at Paris were not doing so out of genuine concern for trans rights.

They were doing it because she is young (people have criticized her for having strong opinions at such a young age), because she is successful (she currently has over 300k subscribers on TikTok), and because watching her be brought down felt satisfying.

Paris is not a villain.

She is a person, a young woman who built a platform around sharing her lived experience and who made some missteps in moderating that platform. That’s it.

But the internet (especially TikTok) is built on villain and victim, attack and defense, guilty or innocent.

Paris had always reminded me of lipgloss.

If you don’t know who lipgloss is, she is also a Black woman creator with strong opinions who had been similarly targeted and ultimately driven off social media entirely. The commenters mourning her absence were making a broader point.

Genuinely terrible people remain online. People who create actual harm, who peddle real bigotry, who hurt people on purpose. And they are doing just fine.

But a young Black woman who made feminist content and failed to moderate her comments fast enough? She ends up crying on camera, reading from a script, trying to prove herself to people who are gleefully tearing her down.

I had always feared that Paris would meet the same fate as lipgloss.

When she explained that as a Black woman she is especially sensitive to having her words contorted due to racist and sexist agendas, the nuance was lost there too. This was her way of saying that people were hurting her. They were turning her into someone who she is not and this is a deep trigger for her (this would honestly trigger anyone!).

She said in her video that she hoped her platform could be a safe space for women. And I believe her. I think she actually meant that.

The question is whether the internet will ever be a safe space for her.

Too many people are self-righteous and inflammatory.

There is no space for nuance.

No space for critical thinking.

And when it comes to women who dare to be imperfect in public, there is definitely no space for grace.

I hope Paris doesn’t censor herself.

People complain about how watered down our media has become, but it’s because the public is quick to attack and slow to think.

Feminism that only applies to women who have said every right thing, in every right way, at every right moment, is not feminism.

It is a performance.

Paris Mwendwa came to her camera in tears, reading from a written statement, trying to be understood.

And she deserved to be.

What saddens me about this situation is that it felt like I was watching a public execution.

The hurt in her eyes is honestly very heartbreaking.

Paris is only 21.

She didn’t attack anyone. She didn’t bully anyone. She didn’t call anyone names.

She only wanted to talk about feminism.

She wanted to talk about social issues that affect her and millions of others.

She wanted to create a safe space to share her thoughts and connect with others.

But that was destroyed.

Even before this situation, I have seen people online say that they dislike her, that they hate her, that they wish she would go away.

But I don’t understand.

You can disagree with her. That is OK!

But Paris has never done anything so nefarious that she deserves to be hated or cyber-bullied on Tiktok or on any other platform.

I’ve noticed that when you share your opinions online, people assume that you have a big ego and will look for every opportunity to “humble” you and “put you in your place.”

I believe that this is the real issue that nobody wants to admit.

People are too quick to assume malice!!!

They think everyone is evil and a villain!

But I’ve noticed that the people who are quick to assume malice are also the worst individuals you will come across on this earth.

They always carry a hateful and murderous energy.

TikTok definitely has a feminist problem.

It’s honestly so disappointing that TikTok “feminists” can’t discuss feminism without spiraling into a witch-burning where the main objective is plain cruelty.

I’m tired of these same people yapping about mental health and then turning around and treating someone like this.

I hope Paris is surrounded by people who love and care for her 💗

The internet isn’t ready for women with strong opinions.

And the internet definitely isn’t ready for Black women with strong opinions.

The internet has failed Paris Mwendwa.

We don’t deserve her.

“As a Black woman, I find myself functioning on defense and being extra sensitive to when my words or stances are being contorted due to a racist and sexist agenda”---Paris Mwendwa

***Paris is actually on Substack! Her publication is here if you’d like to check it out. She shares a lot of interesting essays and perspectives. Please be kind to her, even if you don’t agree. People should feel safe enough to have open and respectful discussions 💗

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

References

@parismwendwaI’m sorry.

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Wiktionary defines a dreamgirl as “one’s ideal vision of a female companion.”

Most of us have spent a long time imagining that woman in relation to someone else. Who she is to a partner, a boss, or a room full of strangers. But what does it look like to become your own dream girl?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. About the gap between who we are and who we are performing. About all the ways we shrink, second-guess, and reshape ourselves to fit an image that was never really ours to begin with.

A 2018 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that women’s well-being is consistently undermined by “projective identification with outdated gender role norms. This is a fancy way of saying we absorb other people’s expectations and start mistaking them for our own (Barnard, 2018).

Becoming your own dream girl is the act of undoing that.

1. Be honest about your jealousy (especially to yourself)

Nobody wants to admit to being jealous. It puts you in a vulnerable position. It conflicts with the image most of us are trying to hold of ourselves (competent, secure, unbothered). And so most people don’t admit it. Not online, not to their friends, and most importantly, not to themselves.

But this is one of the most expensive forms of self-deception there is.

A viral TikTok moment made this undeniable for me.

A girl came forward to share that she had ended a friendship because she was jealous.

She was jealous that her friend seemed to have a life handed to her, without the same struggle.

TikTok, predictably, exploded. People called her toxic, dangerous, even threatening.

But what struck me were the things that were being left unsaid.

If everyone has someone who has been jealous of them, why does virtually no one ever admit to having been jealous themselves?

Well, it’s because they’re lying to themselves. And without introspection, they’re robbing themselves of the opportunity to gain a better understanding of their desires.

When you feel resentment toward someone else’s life, don’t ignore it. Get curious about it instead. Jealousy isn’t proof that you’re a bad person. Jealousy informs you about what you want and what you fear you can’t have.

The girl on TikTok who walked away from a friendship that was making her resentful wasn’t the villain the internet was trying to make her out to be. She was self-aware enough to recognize that her emotions were building into something she might not be able to control.

2. Stop pretending you have it all together

At some point, most of us internalized the idea that the ideal woman is someone who manages her time perfectly, balances everything effortlessly, and never loses control of her life. But this is definitely a fantasy.

Barnard (2018) describes work-life balance as “a never-ending and continuously disappointing quest.”

Living a balanced life isn’t impossible, but the image of balance we’ve been sold is. It was designed around a life that most women don’t actually have.

The best alternative is to stop thinking of balance as a destination and start thinking of it as a daily negotiation. Some days, you pour more into your work. Other days, you focus more on your personal life does. And in some seasons, you’re flying too close to the sun (stressed out, challenged, slightly terrified).

The women in Barnard’s study described this feeling through the metaphor of Icarus: “Every time you survive; you didn’t fall... you are not falling out of the sky.”

3. Rebuild Your Identity

Becoming your own dream girl/woman requires sitting with who you are currently and dissecting the areas that were shaped by other people’s expectations.

Barnard’s (2018) research identifies “identity work” as central to women’s psychological well-being. Identity work is the ongoing process of reconciling who you actually are (your personal identity) with who others expect you to be (your social identity).

Ask yourself whether your beliefs about what you can achieve, how you should behave, and what you deserve are actually yours.

Which beliefs were imprinted on you from an environment, a relationship, or a culture that never had your best interests at heart?

The participants in Barnard’s research described recognizing their own self-sabotage and the urge to “stay with the crowd,” as a turning point in understanding how they viewed themselves.

Self-awareness of those internalized limits is the first step in dismantling them.

4. Embrace both your strengths and vulnerability

The “dream girl” is often presented as someone who is always confident and composed. She just has to do her best and everything will work in her favor. However, this isn’t realistic.

Barnard (2018) found that women sustain their well-being not by eliminating negative experiences, but by “engaging both positive and negative experiences.”

It’s okay to be both ambitious and scared, capable and uncertain, strong and still figuring it out.

The study uses the metaphor of the Centaur, half human, half horse, a creature that embodies contradictory natures simultaneously, to describe how women actually experience their lives. “Being both an airplane and an insect all at once. Being both strong and vulnerable, both agile and quite sluggish.”

5. Don’t Compare Yourself to Strangers

One of the worst habits many of us have developed is constantly comparing ourselves to others.

According to Barnard’s (2018) research, women “frequently assess their self-worth through constant interpersonal comparison,” often idealizing others while undercutting themselves. One participant in the study reflected, after watching a younger woman at a wedding: “I wish I was as sorted out as they are at that age... I am actually not even where she is now.”

Don’t compare yourself to someone else’s present.

Instead, compare the current you to t your past self. You’ve probably come much farther than you thought.

Don’t think about whether your life is as “good” as theirs.

Ask yourself, “Does my life feel like mine?”

The research calls this the identity task of self-regard, which is building a relationship with yourself that is stable enough to not require constant external validation.

Becoming your own dream girl isn’t just about cute quotes and copying an aesthetic.

It’s more of an identity project.

Becoming your own dream girl is the long, non-linear, deeply personal work of reconciling who you actually are and who you might have been forced to be just to survive.

The good news is you just have to keep showing up as yourself, more fully, more honestly, and with a little more permission than you gave yourself yesterday.

As always, thank you for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

References

Barnard A. Well-Being, More Than a Dream: Women Constructing Metaphors of Strength. Front Psychol. 2018 Jul 10;9:1186. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01186. PMID: 30042718; PMCID: PMC6048409.

dreamgirl - Wiktionary, the free dictionary. (2022). Wiktionary. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dreamgirl

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This is what many women say online whenever they try out a new makeup style or wear an outfit they think doesn’t suit them.

But why do they believe the look doesn’t “suit” them?

When a woman says, “I feel like a pig wearing lipstick,” It means that no matter what they do, no matter how much effort they put in, how carefully they dress, or how many steps are in their skincare routine, they still feel like they don’t belong in the world of “pretty.”

Instead, they feel like you are a fraud. Like they are trying too hard and everyone can see it.

Pretty privilege is real. We already know this. Studies show that attractive people are hired more, paid more, treated more kindly by strangers, and even sentenced more leniently in court. Being beautiful opens doors. Being beautiful makes life easier.

But here is the part that doesn’t get talked about enough: beauty is not a level playing field. It is a system. And like most systems, it has gatekeepers.

What is Pretty Privilege?

According to Dictionary.com (n.d.), pretty privilege is, “an unearned and mostly unacknowledged societal advantage that a person has by fitting into the beauty standards of their culture.”

One of the most important things to remember about pretty privilege is that it is unearned, so having or not having this privilege reflects nothing on a person’s character.

The Illusion of Effortlessness

The first rule of pretty privilege is that it has to look like you’re not trying.

The most celebrated beauty aesthetic right now is the “clean girl.” Minimal makeup. Slicked-back hair. Clear skin. A simple, neutral outfit. The whole point is to look like you just woke up looking like that.

To be truly “pretty,” you have to look like beauty is something that simply happened to you, and not something you have to work for.

Money & Pretty Privilege

But behind every “clean girl” is an expensive routine. We’re talking high-end serums, tinted moisturizers that cost more than most people’s grocery budgets, preventative Botox starting in your twenties, and “quiet luxury” basics with prices that will make you gasp out loud.

We’ve created a system where people are influenced to spend significant amounts of money to look like they’re not spending any money at all. Being “natural” has now just become a performance.

If you don’t have disposable income, you simply cannot access this particular version of pretty. But this is by design. The goalposts are meant to always be a little out of reach.

The Intersection of Race & Pretty Privilege

Then there’s the question of which type of natural beauty gets rewarded. Western beauty standards have historically centered Eurocentric features like thin noses and straight hair.

But these are not universal ideals and were constructed in a way that excludes most of the world. For women from marginalized groups, accessing pretty privilege often requires proximity to whiteness. For decades, women of color have straightened their natural hair, bleached their skin, and gotten rhinoplasties to narrow features that are perfectly beautiful as they are.

This is not “beauty care” but the cost of entry into a system that was never designed to include them. Colorism exists within marginalized communities and lighter skin is treated as the standard.

You will find people online voicing their unpopular opinion by saying that known beauties like Olandria and Lupita Nyong’o are just “not that attractive” or “just not pretty.”

Maybe it’s just for some internet clout, but we all know it’s actually something deeper.

Don’t Be Too Pretty

The gatekeeping of pretty privilege is especially cruel because it’s designed to be impossible to pass through.

Be pretty, but not too pretty.

If you’re too beautiful, then you’re a bimbo. You’re threatening and you must not be very smart. Your looks become a reason to dismiss everything else about you.

But if you’re not pretty enough, you become invisible. Society decides that you’re less valuable. You’re ignored, overlooked, and slowly learn to take up less space because space was never really offered to you.

The “Goldilocks Zone” of pretty privilege is almost impossibly narrow. You need to be attractive enough to be seen and taken seriously, but not so attractive that your looks undermine your credibility.

And you have to do all of this while appearing not to care about any of it.

Don’t Be a Try-hard

In a previous essay, I wrote about how the clean girl killed the glamorous woman.

I wrote about how wearing bold makeup, dramatic lashes, sculpted contour, and colorful eyeshadow is now seen as trying too hard.

Women who embody this look are viewed as being a little too much.

They’re seen as not being naturally beautiful enough to pull off a simpler look.

The clean girl, on the other hand, is rewarded because she appears to have won the genetic lottery. She’s beautiful as she is and doesn’t need all that “stuff.”

The message we are being told is that glamour is for women who have something to hide. The clean look is for women who have nothing to hide.

And yet both looks require money and effort.

The difference is that one look is allowed to show the effort, and the other is to pretend that effort wasn’t needed.

Women aren’t allowed to just be comfortable with themselves. The beauty that was aspirational last year is the beauty that is embarrassing this year. Keep up, or get left behind.

The Kim and Kylie Problem

If you want to understand how the gatekeeping works, look at what happened to Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner. For years, they were the standard.

Kim Kardashian essentially rewrote what mainstream beauty looked like. The contouring, the body shape, the full glam. She made it aspirational.

Millions of women tried to recreate her look. Entire product lines were built around her and she became one of the most recognizable and imitated women in the world.

And yet, she was never fully accepted as being beautiful.

People always point out that Kim has had work done. They say her beauty is not real, that she bought that face.

But everyone else’s beauty is just “good genes.”

Kylie Jenner grew up in front of the camera. She was a teenager when people started picking apart her appearance.

When she opened up about getting lip fillers, people didn’t respond with admiration for her honesty.

It served as a gotcha. See? She was never naturally pretty. It was always fake.

But Kim and Kylie did exactly what the beauty industry told them to do. They invested in their appearance. They kept up with trends. They changed whatever the market asked them to change.

Kim has visibly slimmed down and shifted toward a more “understated” look in recent years. Kylie has dissolved fillers and leaned into a softer, less constructed image. They still follow the “rules” but are still not accepted.

In this case, being pretty just isn’t enough. How you became “pretty” matters too.

Natural Beauty Carries Moral Superiority

The unspoken rule is that pretty privilege only fully applies if you were born pretty.

Your beauty needs to be inherited, effortless, and signal that you’re “The Chosen One.”

The moment it looks like you worked for it, paid for it, or constructed it, you’re disqualified.

We live in a society that views natural beauty as moral superiority.

People say that if you’re not natural then you’re a fraud.

I don’t know if any of my readers watch Korean dramas, but a perfect example of this would be the K-drama “My ID is Gangnam Beauty.”

In this show, the main character Kang Mi-rae, underwent plastic surgery after being relentlessly bullied for being ugly. She finds herself getting bullied in college by Hyun Soo-ah, a naturally beautiful girl whose flawless looks mask a deeply manipulative and cruel personality. Despite Mi-rae’s painful journey to reinvent herself, Soo-ah weaponizes social influence to isolate and belittle her. The drama uses this tension to challenge the idea that natural beauty carries moral superiority. It shows how Soo-ah’s untouched appearance conceals far more ugliness than Mi-rae’s plastic surgery scars ever could.

“Natural beauty carries moral superiority.”

This is another way that pretty privilege is being gatekept.

You can spend every resource you have trying to meet the standard, only to still be excluded.

This made me realize that it was never just about how you look but whether people thought you deserved to look that way.

The Algorithm as a Gatekeeper

Social media didn’t invent pretty privilege, but made it more widespread and visible than it has ever been.

TikTok and Instagram algorithms reward creators who fit a narrow visual mold and push their content so it gets seen. It’s not by accident that the women who go viral tend to have a symmetrical face, lighter skin, and a skinny body.

But with filters and Instagram face, everyone’s features became smoothed and sharpened into something uncanny.

The standard moved from “attractive” to “digitally perfect,” and digitally perfect is not something any real face can maintain.

Beauty standards didn’t become just high, they became virtual.

The “beauty” created by filters doesn’t exist in the physical world, yet we are still expected to embody it.

Who Is Allowed to Be Pretty?

Women online have been saying that they don’t feel allowed to be feminine.

They feel like they don’t have permission to be pretty.

They look at beauty standards and see that they were designed for someone who has a different body type, a different skin tone, a different face, and lives in a different tax bracket.

The “pig in lipstick” feeling is what happens when a woman tries to look beautiful but just ends up feeling ridiculous.

Women are always told that they’re not beautiful because they’re not trying hard enough, but how can anyone be “beautiful” in a society where pretty privilege has been policed, prized, racialized, gendered, and filtered through algorithms and trends that change faster than anyone can keep up.

Beauty standards are meant to be chased because, as long as we’re doing everything in our power to be chosen, spending all of our money, and constantly fighting each other, we’re never stopping to ask who truly benefits from keeping pretty privilege out of reach.

We’ll never be free until we accept that true equity is impossible as long as human value is measured by a standard that excludes most of us.

As always, thank you so much for reading 💗

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

References

Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words. (n.d.). Dictionary.com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pretty-privilege

‌*All images sourced from Pinterest

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You dream of living a life that makes you excited to wake up every day. You want to spend your time doing things that are authentic to you and go to bed at night feeling like you’re actually moving toward something.

Most people think that life is meant for the lucky ones. They envy the ones who were just born into the right situation, or who figured themselves out early, or who just seem to have everything together.

Scientists have spent decades studying how people actually build lives they love and it turns out that it’s not just about luck or perfect timing.

Science has uncovered a set of simple habits that anyone can use to build their dream life.

1. Figure Out What You Actually Want. Not What Everyone Else Wants for You

I used to think wanting more for myself was embarrassing.

I would think to myself, “Who do you think you are to want that? Do you actually think you could have that life?”

I had somehow picked up the idea that staying quiet about your dreams was humble, and that people who set big goals were a little delusional.

It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t being “mature” or “realistic,” just fearful.

Researchers Schippers and Ziegler (2019) studied what they call life crafting.

This is basically the practice of sitting down and thinking carefully about what you want your life to look like across all the big areas like your work, your relationships, your health, and how you spend your free time.

They found that people who take the time to discover what they truly want end up happier, healthier, less depressed, and they even live longer (Schippers & Ziegler, 2019).

But in order to be successful, your goals have to actually be yours. Research shows that only goals you’ve chosen for yourself (not ones made by your parents, partner, society, etc.) will actually make you feel fulfilled (Ryan & Deci, 2000, as cited in Schippers & Ziegler, 2019).

Think about everyone you know who has a good job, a nice house, and a beautiful family, yet still seems kind of miserable. Oftentimes, it’s because they built their life around someone else’s dream, not their own.

There’s a Japanese word for having a purpose that feels truly yours. The word ikigai, roughly means “feeling like your daily life is worth living” (Kono et al., 2019, as cited in Schippers & Ziegler, 2019).

Studies of communities where people live unusually long lives found that having this sense of ikigai was directly connected to lower death rates even when researchers accounted for things like diet, exercise, and personality (Hill & Turiano, 2014, as cited in Schippers & Ziegler, 2019). Having a sense of purpose can actually help you live longer.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust, said that life can have meaning in even the worst circumstances (Frankl, 1985, as cited in Kelly, 2023).

So ask yourself what you actually want.

It doesn’t have to be “realistic,” “sound good,” or be “prestigious.”

What do you want?

2. Write It Down With Details

I noticed that the people who are actually doing something with their lives are always writing stuff down. They make plans that help them to be more intentional.

Schippers and Ziegler (2019) found that one of the most powerful things you can do is write about your best possible self.

Your best possible self should be a detailed picture of who you’d be if everything went the way you hoped.

Studies show that writing about the future you want makes you more optimistic, less depressed, and more likely to actually take steps toward building that future (Peters et al., 2010; Meevissen et al., 2011, as cited in Schippers & Ziegler, 2019).

When you write something down clearly, your brain starts paying attention to it, and you begin to notice opportunities you would have missed before. You make small choices that start adding up.

The research also shows that vague goals don’t really work. What does work is what Schippers and Ziegler (2019) call goal attainment plans.

Basically, “if this happens, I will do that” plans.

You shouldn’t just say, “I want to get fit,” but be more specific by saying, “Every day after work, I will go for a 20-minute walk. If I miss a day, I’ll go the next morning instead.”

Being more detailed about your goals leads to behavior changes in a way that general intentions just don’t (Koestner et al., 2002, as cited in Schippers & Ziegler, 2019).

There’s even a neurological reason writing helps.

When you write out what you plan to do, your brain starts treating it more like something that already happened, which makes you more likely to follow through (Balcetis & Cole, 2009, as cited in Schippers & Ziegler, 2019).

So, write about where you want to be in five years, what your ideal week looks like, how you’re going to get there, and what you’ll do when things get hard.

3. Don’t Wait Until You Feel Ready. Just Start Building

I told myself for a long time that I’d start once things in my life calmed down. I wanted to wait until I had more confidence, more time, more money, and proof that it would actually work out.

But I realized that confidence comes from doing, not from waiting.

Researchers Gardner, Lally, and Wardle (2012) studied how habits actually form.

The key to sticking with something long-term isn’t having a lot of willpower or feeling excited about it every day. You should be doing the same action in the same situation over and over until your brain starts doing it automatically, like how you don’t have to think about brushing your teeth, you just do it because it’s part of your routine (Gardner et al., 2012).

You might have heard that it takes 21 days to form a habit but that number is actually a myth (Lally et al., 2010, as cited in Gardner et al., 2012).

Research says that it actually takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to start feeling natural and easy.

Schippers and Ziegler (2019) also point out that an important aspect of building your dream life is being honest about how motivated you are to build the habits you’d need to get where you want to go.

4. Be Honest About What’s Actually in Your Way

A lot of popular advice about building your dream life isn’t based on evidence and can just leave you feeling frustrated.

Dixon, Hornsey, and Hartley (2023) did a study on what they call manifestation beliefs.

Manifestation beliefs is the idea (made famous by books like The Secret by Rhonda Byrne), that you can create a successful life just by thinking positively, visualizing what you want, and acting like it’s already yours. They found that over a third of people actually believe in this.

But unfortunately, the research doesn’t support this belief.

People who believed strongly in manifestation thought of themselves as more successful, but when the researchers looked at actual income and education levels, those people were no different from anyone else (Dixon et al., 2023).

Worse, the people who scored highest on manifestation beliefs were also more likely to have gone bankrupt, scammed, and to have made risky financial decisions that didn’t pay off (Dixon et al., 2023). Researchers found that relying on manifestation alone can lead people to skip things like planning, habit-building, and honest self-assessment because they believe their future is out of their hands and is completely in the hands of the universe.

This isn’t me dunking on manifestation though. Being hopeful makes life easier but there’s a big difference between being hopeful and strategic versus being hopeful instead of strategic.

Real change only happens when you stop trying to change everything around you and focus on the things you can actually control. Every hard situation in life is an opportunity to grow, but only if you face it honestly rather than just waiting for it to disappear (Kelly, 2023).

“It doesn’t matter what we expect from life. What matters is what life is asking of us, and whether we’re willing to answer”-Viktor Frankl.

5. Let People Watch You Become

Don’t let your dream life stay just a dream forever.

Schippers and Ziegler (2019) found that one of the most powerful ways to start building a life you love is making a public commitment by telling at least one person what you’re working towards.

Stanley Krippner (2006) studied groups of people who shared their dreams and fears with each other. These conversations led to people leaving jobs that didn’t feel right, beginning to work on projects they had been putting off, and starting to figure out what they actually wanted.

Being seen is an important part of transformation (Krippner, 2006).

In another essay, I wrote about how the fear of being perceived is blocking your destiny.

Being perceived can feel scary because what if you tell someone about your dreams and then you fail? What if you share what you think your purpose in life is, and people laugh, think you’re doing too much, or just don’t care?

But what if you succeed?

Researchers Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky (2000) found that we dramatically overestimate how much other people are paying attention to us. We walk around feeling like everyone is watching and judging us, but the truth is, most people are too busy thinking about themselves and their own lives to be watching that closely (Gilovich et al., 2000).

So don’t be ashamed to publish that essay, post that video, or sign up for that class.

Building your dream life isn’t easy because the fear doesn’t always go away, life stays complicated, and you will still struggle through some very hard days.

But the people who built their dream lives aren’t necessarily special. They just started by writing things down, building small habits, and being honest with themselves about their goals.

Krippner (2006) writes that the person you’re trying to become is already inside you, waiting to take shape.

Ten years from now, you will have lived ten years either way, so it’s time to decide whether you want to start moving towards the life you want or continue waiting.

As always, please show up for yourself ♡

With endless love, Chelsea ❤︎

References

Dixon LJ, Hornsey MJ, Hartley N. “The Secret” to Success? The Psychology of Belief in Manifestation. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2025 Jan;51(1):49-65. doi: 10.1177/01461672231181162. Epub 2023 Jul 8. PMID: 37421301; PMCID: PMC11616226.

Gardner B, Lally P, Wardle J. Making health habitual: the psychology of ‘habit-formation’ and general practice. Br J Gen Pract. 2012 Dec;62(605):664-6. doi: 10.3399/bjgp12X659466. PMID: 23211256; PMCID: PMC3505409.

Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211

Kelly JD 4th. Your Best Life: Real Change Occurs Within. Clin Orthop Relat Res. 2023 Aug 1;481(8):1483-1485. doi: 10.1097/CORR.0000000000002748. Epub 2023 Jun 22. PMID: 37345906; PMCID: PMC10344477.

Krippner, Stanley. (2018). The Construction of Reality in “Waking Life” and “Dreaming Life”. Journal of Conscious Evolution, 2(2). https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cejournal/vol2/iss2/15

Schippers MC, Ziegler N. Life Crafting as a Way to Find Purpose and Meaning in Life. Front Psychol. 2019 Dec 13;10:2778. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02778. PMID: 31920827; PMCID: PMC6923189.

*Images sourced from Pinterest

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I used to think that to be ambitious you had to be born bold.

I was taught that desiring things was unseemly and that the best thing to do was to just be grateful for what you have. Wanting more was seen as greed.

So I began to view ambition as something impractical and unrealistic. I called it “knowing my place.”

But beneath all of those thoughts, the ambition was always there.

This is issue 003 of the Hot Girl Curriculum: The Hot Girl’s Guide to Being Wildly Ambitious.

[Part 1] How We Learned to Make Our Ambition Smaller

According to Merriam-Webster (2019), ambition is “an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power” and also a “desire to achieve a particular end/goal.”

No, being an ambitious woman doesn’t make you masculine, arrogant, or rude.

The world is in love with the quietly hardworking woman. She has goals and achievements but frames them modestly, so that no one feels ashamed or threatened. She is successful, but makes her success look almost accidental so people don’t think that she is boasting about her hard work.

Women are praised for being helpful and cooperative. We are praised for not making a fuss, for not asking for too much, and for being the type of girl who lifts others up without expecting to be lifted herself.

But it’s very rare for a woman to be praised for being ambitious.

I wish more women had the freedom to come out and say something like, “I’m going to do something BIG and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”

In another article, I wrote about how the fear of being perceived is blocking your destiny.

Women have been conditioned to hide themselves so they are not accused of not being humble.

We need to find the line between humility and self-erasure.

💗[Part 2] Why Wanting Feels Like a Crime

I’ve noticed something uncomfortable about myself.

Whenever I share a personal goal, there’s a split second before I say it where I brace myself. I add a little laugh and say something like, “I know it sounds crazy, but…” or “I’m probably being too ambitious, but…” before I actually bring it up.

I was scared that my goals wouldn’t receive approval.

I wanted to check whether the goal was acceptable or whether the people around me would find it unreasonable.

I was also scared that confidently saying it out loud would be seen as arrogance.

This is what ambition guilt feels like.

It doesn’t matter if your goal seems too “unrealistic” or too “big.”

The only approval you need is from yourself.

Alejandra Rojas wrote an article for Forbes titled “Ambition Guilt Is A Hidden Cost For Women Building Wealth.”

Rojas (2026) describes ambition guilt as, “...a non-financial factor that interferes with long-term financial outcomes by quietly shaping how women relate to higher levels of income, ambition, self-worth, and the pursuit of more.

Ambition guilt tells you to stay in your lane and just be grateful for what you have.

But you can be grateful and still desire more at the same time. You can love your life and still be building towards something better.

[Part 3] When You Don’t Know What You Actually Want

I’ve realized that some of us aren’t actually scared of being ambitious, it’s just that we don’t know what ambition looks like because we’ve spent so many years shaping our desires around what was available, acceptable, and realistic. So many of us have lost the ability of knowing what we want.

We often:

-Choose success that feels hollow but we don’t know how to explain why

-Chase a goal that seems impressive but doesn’t make us feel anything

Ambition without a clear plan or direction is just energy with nowhere to go. And many of us have been so conditioned to keep our expectations low that when someone asks us what we really want, the honest answer is: “I’m not sure anymore.”

Luckily, you don’t need to know your entire life’s ambition all at once. You just have to be honest about what is pulling at you right now. Think about that goal that keeps coming to mind, no matter how many times you try to talk yourself out of it.

[Part 4] The Audit: Figuring Out What You Are Actually Building Toward

I keep a running document on my phone called “The Real List.”

It’s not a to-do list or a vision board, but a place where I write down everything I want.

Here, I focus on the type of success that feels like mine and not the one that sounds good to others.

Writing this list has helped me clarify so many things going on in my life.

And of course, I can’t forget my guided journal questions!

The Hot Girl’s Guided Journal Questions:

What have you been doing in secret that you haven’t shared in public yet?

Think about the blog you started but haven’t told anyone about. The application you’ve been drafting and saving, but not submitting. The idea you keep returning to but keep on dismissing. The things you do in private are often closer to your actual ambition than anything you have said out loud. What have you been quietly building?

What type of life makes you feel like you can breathe?

Don’t just think of the life that sounds impressive on paper. You don’t need to “prove” something to anyone. Think about what would actually make you fulfilled. What does that look like?

Who are you jealous of, and what exactly does that jealousy tell you?

Jealousy tells us so much about ourselves. We are not jealous randomly. We’re envious of the things we want and have not yet allowed ourselves to want openly. So the next time you feel jealousy towards a person or situation, don’t just dismiss it, get curious. What about that person/situation is making you react?

What would you do if the outcome was guaranteed?

We’re scared of being seen trying and failing. It can feel embarrassing that people know that you wanted something, only for you to not get it. If you removed the possibility of failure entirely, what would you go after?

What have you talked yourself out of, and why?

Make your own “Real List.” Write down the goals you wanted to achieve but have given up on. Include your reasoning, like it was too expensive, too unlikely, too bold, not the right time, not practical enough. Then take a look at the list and ask yourself, “Are those obstacles actually insurmountable, or was I just trying to be “safe?”

[Part 5] What Becoming Wildly Ambitious Actually Looks Like

Being wildly ambitious doesn’t mean being reckless or ruthless. It doesn’t mean you stop caring about people or start treating your life like a productivity spreadsheet or wake up every morning at five in the morning, constantly in pursuit of your “best self.”

Being wildly ambitious means deciding that your goals deserve the same energy you pour into everyone else.

It means starting before you’re even ready, not waiting for everything to be “perfect,” and trusting in yourself without needing other people’s approval.

Please return to that goal/project again and again and again. Keep on going even when things don’t go the way you planned and nobody notices any of the hard work you’re putting in.

There will be moments when you will feel unstoppable. And there will be moments where things go quiet, the work feels pointless, and you begin to wonder whether it was a good idea to start on this journey.

You don’t need to “earn” the right to want something.

And don’t scale down your vision to fit the comfort level of people who were never going to support your dreams anyway.

It’s time for you to decide that what you’re building matters. The time you spend on your goals/projects are necessary, not selfish.

Your ambition is never too much.

This is issue 003 of the Hot Girl Curriculum, with a new guide published every month! I was planning on publishing this series weekly, but decided to scale back for quality purposes. I hope you understand ♡

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like to see more articles like this! I’ll be posting often to reach my goal of writing 100 articles in one year!

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References

Merriam-Webster. (2019). Definition of AMBITION. Merriam-Webster.com. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ambition

Rojas, A. (2026, April 24). Ambition Guilt Is A Hidden Cost For Women Building Wealth. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrarojas/2026/04/24/ambition-guilt-is-a-hidden-cost-for-women-building-wealth/

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And I’m not saying this to brag. It’s actually one of my biggest flaws.

I’ve always tried my best to make the people around me feel comfortable. I give freely. My time, my energy, everything I could possibly give. But recently, I’ve come to the realization that it was never enough.

And in a way, it made me feel like I would never be enough.

People have told me, “Thank you! Remember when you did this for me…”

But I never remember because I don’t keep count.

I try my best to be “good” because I’ve always been told that it’s the right thing to do.

I’ve been raised to believe that it’s right to keep the peace. To try to bring some comfort in this cruel world.

But what people don’t tell you about being the “good girl” is that people will use you. People will take and take and take from you until they can’t take anymore. Then, when you break down, they’ll gaslight you into believing you were the villain all along.

When you put yourself first, especially for the first time, people will say things like, “Why is she doing this? I never expected this from her.”

“This isn’t like her.”

But what they’re actually saying is, “I never expected her to remember herself. I never expected her to put herself first. I definitely never expected her to put herself before me.”

And it will shock them. Make them uncomfortable. Make them angry. And they will lash out at you. Or let turmoil brew beneath their silence. But in the end, they will always be cruel.

Some believe that to be good, you must be selfless. And to be selfless, you must throw yourself away. But the truth is no one can truly abandon themselves. Even if we try, there will come a day when we’ll need to confront ourselves. You will need to heal the wounds of you, whom you’ve abandoned.

People will undervalue you. They will overlook you. Your “goodness” which you considered an asset, will instead make you invisible. You will just be there. Like a chair in their living room or a spoon in their bowl.

When I realized that one of my friends had never cared about me or respected me, I was overcome with a sense of grief. I wondered why she was making such snide remarks because you don’t say such things to a friend.

I realized friendship meant something different to her.

Or maybe it was me. Friendship with me meant something different to her.

She would never have said those words to any of her other friends.

And that’s when I realized that the “good girl” never got love or respect. People expect you to smile when they hurt you. They expect you to hold it in. They expect you to pretend that you’re okay.

Why? Because you’re good. You’re nice.

That is what they expect of you.

I realized that although I always strived to be a “good girl” towards my friend, I never expected my friend to be a “good girl” towards me.

I tried to be understanding whenever she did something I didn’t like.

I tried to accept her as she was.

I tried to respect that she was a separate human being with her own opinions, thoughts, and perspectives.

“People are different,” I told myself. “You’ve got to respect that.”

I always gave her the benefit of the doubt.

Why? Because I view my friends as family. And family forgives your flaws.

But that day, my friend crossed a line, and there was no turning back.

We are no longer friends.

I remember when we did icebreakers in high school, and the teacher would say, “Use one word to describe yourself.”

I would often describe myself as, “Creative.” Or “Friendly.” Other times, I would say “Patient.”

I’m a very patient person. I endure. I don’t like to give up early. I always put effort into everything I do because I love to see things to the end.

I may give up on projects (I have a whole notebook of unfinished poetry!), but I never give up on people.

But sometimes we need to let go of the aspects of our personality that are hurting us. Being the good girl was ruining my life. It was affecting how I viewed myself, my value, my self-esteem, and what I believed to be my purpose in life. I was slowly becoming invisible, an accessory in other people’s lives.

Albert Einstein once said, “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”

Abhijit Naskar said, “Live to serve, serve to live.”

But I won’t live for others anymore. Why? Because I realized that everyone has been living for themselves.

It seems I never got the memo.

I do get a lot of satisfaction from serving others. It has always given me a sense of purpose. But I’ve found that serving strangers is easier.

When you serve your family or a friend, you expect it to be reciprocal. You expect them to be good to you in the same way that you were good to them. So it can be disappointing to discover that not everyone has the capacity to love you in the way you want to be loved.

And maybe “selfish” people are smarter than the good girls of this world. They know if you give and give and give, you will just end up giving all yourself away. So they might give 10% of themselves, or 20%, or 45%. But never 90% or 100%.

They will guard themselves. Build strong boundaries. Keep themselves safe.

I actually find this mentality to be quite healthy.

Please don’t give 100% of yourself to someone who is only giving you 50%, or 20%, or 5%. As people on the internet say, match their energy. Or else, you’ll just make yourself miserable.

Being the good girl can lead you to having something called resentment debt.

What is resentment debt?

According to Beatriz Albina of Feminist Wellness (2025), “Resentment debt refers to the emotional, psychological, and relational toll that…unappreciated personal sacrifices take on an individual. It manifests as anger, shame, or burnout…when overextending oneself for others leads to feeling used, damaging mental health and relationships.”

It’s meaningful to extend yourself to others. But never overextend. Good girls tend to do a lot of emotional labor and this labor is often left unreciprocated and underappreciated.

As a good girl, if you ever insinuate that you would like to be appreciated, they will make it look like all the “good” you’ve done was just for recognition. They will view you as prideful. Looking for praise that (in their eyes), you don’t deserve.

Good girls are supposed to be good. But they are not supposed to know that they are good.

They’re not supposed to expect the same “goodness” from others. That would be selfish, greedy, wanting too much.

It’s very easy to turn from the good girl into the villain.

If you make people question how they treat you, that will make them uncomfortable. And remember, good girls don’t make people uncomfortable. They maintain the peace.

As the “good girl,” you will experience burnout. You will feel alone. It’s very rare that two “good girls” find each other. It’s very rare that someone will love you in the way that you want to be loved. That you’ll be respected in the way you want to be respected. That you’ll be treated in the way you want to be treated.

As I said, most people understand the importance of having strong boundaries. They protect their energy and prioritize self-love. They don’t give themselves away. Consequently, they lack the capacity and the desire to offer you the same or similar level of devotion they reserve for themselves.

The manifestation of the burnout from being the good girl, whether it be a mental breakdown or self-isolation will completely alter how people view you.

They will say things like, “What happened? Why are you upset? Why aren’t you being “good” anymore?”

They will be angry and confused.

They will lash out at you.

But don’t go back to being the “good girl.”

Being a good girl doesn’t make you a good person.

To be a good person, you must be kind, not nice.

I was able to understand the difference between kindness and niceness after reading this passage by Hannah Barrrett of Hannah Barrett Yoga (2022) where she says, “When we are taught to be nice, we are shown to selflessly put the needs of others before our own – often losing our self in an effort to please. Kindness is more intentional and comes from within; a characteristic that stems from our essence. Nice is our attempts at being agreeable or creating a favourable impression in order to be liked. Kind is our ability, not to put others before ourselves, but to put ourselves in their shoes from a place of compassion and benevolence, wanting what is best for both them and us.”

When you’re nice, you’re behaving in a certain way to be liked by others. It’s a surface-level characteristic, so you often lose yourself and lose sight of what’s truly important. You become a people pleaser.

When you’re kind, you want what’s best for others and yourself. You can not be truly kind if you are not also kind to yourself. Kindness is gentle. Kindness comes from the soul.

I’ll admit that being the “good girl” was partly due to my own ego. I was trying to be “good” because I wanted to be perfect. I didn’t want people to notice my flaws. I was trying to be “good” instead of kind.

And people can sense this ego, this hunger for something that is out of reach.

Because to be “good,” you must pretend to have no ego. No drive or pride. Good girls should always be happy with what they have. They should be quiet, content, and agreeable.

They should not want to bring attention to themselves. They must not make others feel as if they are falling behind.

Good girls make others feel good. They make them feel important. They make them feel comfortable with who they are and where they are. They never challenge them. They tell them everything is going to be okay.

Good girls make other people feel that they too, are good.

One of the worst things about being the “good girl” is that you will internalize this identity as an inherent part of your character. You will have it etched in your soul. You will not want to let the “good girl” go.

And unfortunately, this will damage your mental health, your relationships, and your life.

It will be hard for you to get close to people because you are afraid of being drained, used, and misunderstood. You become scared of being yourself because you are hyper-aware of how people view you. You feel lonely and have no one to turn to.

You become liked by everyone but yourself.

Being the “good girl” almost ruined my life.

But there is truly no such thing as a “good girl” because everyone is flawed.

So please be as good to yourself as you are to others. Please don’t stay silent to keep the peace. Please express when you’re hurt, when you’re overwhelmed, and when you’re tired.

The people who truly love you, the people who value you, the people who respect you, the GOOD people of this world. They will understand.

So now, I have a lot of work to do. I have to show up for myself.

It will take a while for me to find myself again.

Instead of being good, I’ve decided to be human. Humans have flaws, and that’s okay.

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

References

Albina, B. V. (2025, September 18). Ep #344: The Resentment Equation: A Deep Dive Into Emotional Labor Debt. Beatriz Victoria Albina. https://beatrizalbina.com/resentment-equation-emotional-labor-debt/

‌Barrett, H. (2022, November 30). Being Nice vs Being Kind - Hannah Barrett Yoga. Hannah Barrett Yoga. https://www.hannahbarrettyoga.com/being-nice-vs-being-kind/

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I used to think saying no was something you had to earn the right to do.

Like there was a threshold of niceness you had to reach first. A quota of yeses that had to be met before a no was acceptable. Before it wouldn’t make you seem difficult, cold, or ungrateful.

So I kept saying yes to things I didn’t want to do. To people who didn’t care how I felt. To situations that left me feeling empty and a little less like myself each time.

And I told myself that was just what it meant to care about people.

But it wasn’t.

According to Merriam-Webster (n.d.), a boundary is, “something that indicates or fixes a limit or extent.”

In practice, boundaries aren’t just suggestions. They are essential markers of our capacity. Even if you choose to ignore them, your mind and body maintain their own internal thresholds. Neglecting yourself doesn’t just make your needs disappear.

Ignoring your boundaries will only lead to physical and emotional exhaustion.

[Part 1] We Were Taught That Setting Boundaries is Selfish

The world loves women who are endlessly available. She doesn’t inconvenience anyone with her needs and instead makes space for everyone, even when there is no space left for her. She’s often described as giving, warm, and a woman who would do anything for the people she loves.

And she is exhausted.

We were taught that to truly care for someone else, you must first throw yourself away and that asking for the love to be reciprocated is a kind of selfishness that somehow cancels out everything you’ve offered.

But people who have nothing left to give, give badly. They give with resentment because when you give too much, you end up losing yourself.

People hate when you set boundaries because they believe you’re putting up a wall with the purpose of blocking them out, when the truth is that boundaries make it possible to keep showing up for others and yourself.

[Part 2] The Cost of Not Setting Boundaries

Think about that favor you agreed to do or that conversation where you softened your opinion to avoid the awkwardness that comes with disagreement. Think about that event you had to rearrange your entire week for, because declining felt harder than just going.

This is a common occurrence when you have many people you love and care about. You want to make their lives easier. You want to make them feel comfortable.

But this becomes a pattern, you slowly begin to change.

It reminds me of how water reshapes stone. Slowly and gradually, until you finally see the transformation. By the time you’re aware of this change, the stone has already been hollowed out.

You start to disappear from your own life.

And then you’ll feel the exhaustion that comes with being out of alignment with yourself. You’ll have that empty feeling of having left something behind without realizing that the thing you left behind was yourself.

The cost of living without boundaries isn’t just exhaustion but the slow erosion of your ability to know what you actually want, what you actually need, and what you’re actually willing to tolerate. When you’ve spent long enough prioritizing everyone else’s comfort, your own internal signals start to go down.

[Part 3] It’ll be Uncomfortable at First

Setting boundaries can feel terrible the first time you it.

People say it’s empowering and necessary. They post quotes and affirmations that make it look like setting a boundary is just one brave moment that changes everything. But they don’t talk about the guilt. There is an almost irresistible urge to take it back.

And this is the result of conditioning.

The discomfort of setting boundaries isn’t a sign that you’ve done something wrong, it just means that you’re doing something that your nervous system isn’t used to. Remember that setting boundaries is an act that conflicts with everything you’ve been told about what it means to be likable, lovable, and easy to be around.

You were never supposed to be comfortable with your own smallness.

It’s okay to sit with the discomfort. Don’t see it as a reason to retreat.

[Part 4] Figuring Out Your Boundaries

Not every boundary looks the same. Some can be about time, sharing your energy, or about the types of conversations you’re willing to have, the type of treatment you’re willing to accept.

The Hot Girl’s Guided Journal Questions:

When do you feel resentment? Resentment is the result of an unspoken boundary being crossed. When do you find yourself quietly seething even though you said yes?

What do you say ‘yes’ to out of fear? There’s a difference between choosing something and choosing it because the alternative feels too uncomfortable to face. Which yeses in your life are actually fear in disguise? What would happen if you said no instead?

Who do you feel most drained by? Pay attention to the relationships that give you more energy vs the ones that leave you feeling exhausted. There should be a balance between what is being taken from you and what is being given.

What do you want to protect? It could be your time, your peace, your energy, your creativity, or your capacity for joy. What would change if you actually valued these things?

What have you been tolerating? Are you tolerating the friend who only calls when she needs something? Are you tolerating the dynamic that leaves you feeling like a supporting character in your own life? Are you tolerating the relationships that leave you feeling drained because you’re afraid of being alone? Think about the situations you’ve said were “fine” but actually left you unhappy.

[Part 5] What Setting Boundaries Actually Looks Like

Setting boundaries doesn’t have to be dramatic. It doesn’t always require a speech or a confrontation or a difficult conversation you’ve been rehearsing in the shower for three days.

Sometimes it’s just saying, “I can’t do that.”

Sometimes it’s leaving a party an hour earlier than expected, turning off your phone when you need to think, or telling someone you love that a certain topic isn’t something you’re comfortable with discussing right now.

Setting boundaries could also mean refusing to apologize for something when you know you aren’t in the wrong or letting someone be disappointed without immediately working to fix their disappointment.

Sometimes you’ll be able to maintain your boundaries and on some days the old version of you will slide back in, and you’ll find yourself overcommitting, overexplaining, and over-apologizing.

But remember, you’re only human and the work of setting boundaries is a long journey.

The people worth keeping in your life don’t leave when you tell them your boundaries. They respect you and sometimes they’re even relieved, because it gives them the confidence to set boundaries too.

Don’t let anyone convince you that you’re selfish for setting boundaries!

Don’t let anyone convince you that your purpose is to be “convenient.”

Being called “easy-going” isn’t always a compliment.

You matter too!

Boundaries aren’t rejection, they’re honesty.

Don’t just be afraid of disappointing people. Be more afraid of the cost of not putting yourself first.

This is issue 002 of the Hot Girl Curriculum.

With endless love ♡,

Chelsea ❤

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References

Definition of BOUNDARY. (n.d.). Www.merriam-Webster.com. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/boundary

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Most people never let that version out.

And they call it being careful. They call it being private. They call it not caring what others think.

But I think, more often than not, it’s fear.

I used to believe that staying quiet was a form of grace. That holding yourself back was a sign of maturity. That people who sought attention were desperate and people who avoided it were dignified. I built my whole sense of self around this. I was quiet. I was subtle. I didn’t need to be seen.

It took me a while to realize I had confused humility with hiding.

There’s a difference between being private and being invisible. Privacy is a choice. Invisibility is a defense mechanism.

When you’re private, you choose what to share and what to keep. You’re deliberate. You’re in control.

When you’re invisible, you’re not choosing anything. You’re simply afraid that if anyone really looked at you, they would find something wrong.

The fear of being perceived is a very pervasive feeling. It’s not the fear of failure, exactly. It’s not even the fear of rejection. It’s actually something quieter and more insidious. It’s the fear of being witnessed. Of being seen mid-process, mid-mistake, and mid-becoming.

“What if they see me and decide I’m not enough?”

“What if I try and it’s obvious that I’m trying?”

“What if I want something, visibly, and I don’t get it?”

We’re so terrified of wanting things in public that we would rather pretend we never wanted them at all.

Many influencers have admitted to proactively blocking friends and family to escape the “invisible audience” of judgment that hinders their authenticity.

YouTubers have mentioned hiding their channels from friends and acquaintances because the fear of being watched by people from high school was stifling their personality.

And the running joke among Substack writers is that if their real-life friends ever discovered their newsletters, they would hit delete and vanish from the internet entirely.

You wouldn’t care about being seen if you weren’t so worried about what people think of you.

So, my advice to you (and to myself as well) is to LET THEM SEE.

You don’t have to share your projects with them, but if they find it, that’s okay. It’s not the end of the world. And if they start acting weird about it, look at it as a sign to lean further into the people who actually “get” what you’re doing. Seek people who are better aligned, and you’ll feel so much more peace.

So don’t be afraid. Even if your inner circle doesn’t fully understand the “why” behind your work, they should still respect the joy it brings you. The people who care about you should be supportive of your passion. They shouldn’t hinder it.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about the people who are actually building things, doing things, and becoming things:

They are perceived constantly.

And they are misunderstood.

People project onto them, misread them, and form opinions about them based on incomplete information, but that doesn’t stop them.

They’re not necessarily fearless but have decided that the cost of staying hidden is higher than the cost of being judged.

I’ve watched people sit on ideas for years. They complained that they’re ideas weren’t good or the timing wasn’t right but the truth is they couldn’t stand the thought of putting something into the world and having someone react to it.

What if someone disagrees?

What if someone laughs?

What if no one cares?

These are real fears but at some point you need to ask yourself, what is the alternative?

When you carry your ideas around for years without doing anything, you end up watching someone else do that thing you were so afraid of trying.

Researchers Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, and Kenneth Savitsky discovered something called “the spotlight effect” where people consistently overestimate how much others notice and remember their behavior. We believe that people are constantly watching and judging our mistakes.

But the truth is that most people are far too busy worrying about their own lives to pay much attention to yours. Of course people are still watching, but the degree of scrutiny that we’re imagining just doesn’t exist.

We live in a society where perception is currency, reputation matters, and a moment can define you in ways that feel permanent.

This fear has turned into a sort of paralysis.

Yes, people will form opinions about you, they already have.

You’ve already been perceived when you walk into a room, whether you’ve decided to speak or keep quiet, based on your clothes, what you post, and who you decide to hang out with.

You’re constantly asking yourself, “Will I be perceived?”, but the better question is “Will I be seen doing what I actually care about, or will I fail without even trying?”

You can never receive what you’re too afraid to be seen wanting.

The people I admire the most aren’t the luckiest, the most talented, or even the most disciplined but what they share is a willingness to be seen as they grow into themselves. They let the world watch them figure things out.

They experiment, they create, and they’re always moving towards something greater.

And courage doesn’t always have to be some grand act of bravery.

It could be something as simple as publishing that article before it’s perfect, posting that video without caring about who will watch, or wearing that outfit you love even when you’re afraid you’re doing “too much.”

Courage looks like trying.

The people who are most afraid of being perceived are usually the ones with the most to offer.

They have high standards for themselves and care about what people think about them because they’re thoughtful people.

But thoughtfulness is a gift that turns into a curse when it results in inaction.

I also want to mention that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be ready.

It’s okay to want to refine something before you release it or being intentional about how you want to present yourself and your work.

Just don’t fall into the version of “not being ready” that is infinite because “waiting for the right moment” could actually just be fear.

“I’ll do it when I’m more confident.”

When I’m smarter or more beautiful.

When my life is more settled.

When I have more money.

When I have more proof that it will work.

But the truth is that you become confident by doing things, not by waiting until you feel ready.

I’ve thought about all the things that exist in the world because someone decided to be perceived. Every song, book, business, or piece of art that has ever moved me as created by someone who was brave enough to release it into a world that might not care.

They were brave enough to be seen trying.

And then I think about all the things that don’t exist yet, still sitting inside the mind of someone who is waiting to be ready, waiting for the fear to go away.

I wish I could tell them that the fear never goes away, you just have to start moving alongside it.

So think about what you’re destined to do in this world.

How do you want to be remembered?

How do you want to live?

How do you want to be perceived?

Think 10 years from now.

Where do you want to be?

What do you want to have experienced?

What do you want to be known for?

You owe it to yourself to start on the path of your destiny today.

So please, always show up for yourself ♡

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

References

Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211

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I’ve always tried to be polite.

That was how I was raised. Be kind. Be considerate. Be the type of person who makes other people feel comfortable. Don’t take up too much space. Don’t make it about you. Don’t say the wrong thing.

For a long time, I thought that was just who I was.

I spent so long being who I was taught to be that I had almost completely lost track of who I actually was.

And that was why The Hot Girl Curriculum was created. Welcome to issue 001💗💗💗

[Part 1 ]Who are you when no one is watching?

According to Merriam-Webster (n.d.), to ‘perform’ is to “carry out or accomplish something. To adhere to the terms. To present to an audience. To act a part.”

We are all performing something.

The question is whether the performance matches the person.

I spent a long time performing the “nice girl.” The one who gets along with everyone. The one who is friendly and kind. The one who puts others before herself.

People have always told me that I’m a joy to be around, that I get along well with others, and although I have always been grateful for these compliments, I have decided not to internalize them.

Behaviors don’t occur in a vacuum. There is always an influence. There is always a force propelling you into decisions that you thought were truly yours.

This is the first thing to understand about becoming yourself.

Most of what you think of as “you” is actually a collection of influences, expectations, and performances that were assembled long before you were conscious enough to choose them.

And the hot girl’s first move is to take a direct look at these influences, expectations, and performances and examine how they are fueling her goals or weighing her down.

[Part 2] Whose voice is that, really?

No one can be universally loved.

Everyone makes mistakes.

Everyone will annoy others at some point.

I know people who are ridiculed for following the rules and people who are ridiculed for not following the rules. I know people who are hated for their laugh. For their smile. For working hard or not working hard enough. For caring too much or not caring enough.

No matter what you do, there will always be someone who has a problem with it.

And yet most of us spend enormous amounts of energy trying to get it right. Trying to be the correct version of ourselves. The version that will not offend, will not disappoint, will not give anyone a reason to doubt us or look twice.

But where did that come from?

Ask yourself: every rule you live by, every belief you have about yourself, what you are allowed to want, how much space you are allowed to take up, whose voice is saying it?

Is it yours?

Or is it the voice of a society that shaped you before you knew you were being shaped?

I realized something uncomfortable about myself: I had internalized a rule that said I had to exhaust all my resources and prioritize everyone else’s comfort to avoid being labeled “selfish.”

I had to make sure that other people were comfortable before I could relax. I had to give myself to others and be okay with them not doing the same.

That was not a rule I chose. It was a rule I had absorbed. And it had made me oblivious to how others viewed and treated me.

The rules we absorb without choosing them are not always wrong.

Some of them are good. Some of them have kept us safe, helped us build relationships, and taught us how to be considerate towards others.

But some of them are not ours. And until we examine them, we cannot know which is which.

“The first act of becoming yourself is figuring out which beliefs you chose and which ones were chosen for you.”

We must examine the beliefs that prevent us from truly loving ourselves. It’s not comfortable. But it is necessary.

[Part 3] The distance between who you are and the version of yourself you are presenting to the world

There is often a gap between who you are and who you’re performing.

For most people, it’s so normal, so everyday, that they stopped noticing it long ago.

How many times have you laughed at things that didn’t amuse you, said “I don’t mind” when you actually do, or pretended to be calm when you were actually raging inside?

You’ve probably chosen the type of success that is deemed “acceptable,” even though it doesn’t feel right. You’ve stayed in friendships out of habit rather than love and respect and built a personality around what people find easy to accept rather than who you actually are.

Think about that dress you stopped wearing, that hobby you stopped enjoying, and that dream you stopped envisioning, all because you were worrying about what others thought about you.

“Who is she to wear that?”

“Why does she think she can do that?”

“I can’t imagine her doing that.”

[Part 4] How to actually start figuring out who you are

I view every new experience as a learning opportunity.

It’s how I transform my discomfort into something useful. The thoughts, dreams, and visions I held back. The set-backs, regrets, trauma, and tears.

The version of myself I kept small because small felt safer.

Every one of these experiences was information. This information tells you the truth about who you are, but only if you are willing to sit with it honestly.

The following is a set of journal questions to give you clarity. I’ve started journaling again, and there’s something so refreshing about pouring my heart out onto the pages. You can keep the answers to these questions to yourself, or you can drop them in the comments. You can even DM me. I’m always open to hearing your thoughts 🖤

The Hot Girl’s Guided Journal Questions:

What do you do when no one is watching? Not what you tell yourself you do but what you actually do. How do you spend your hours alone? What do you wear at home? What do you talk about when you don’t feel the need to perform? The version of you that exists in private is closer to who you actually are than any version you present publicly.

Where do you feel the most like yourself? I feel most like myself when I am writing. When I am shopping, losing hours in a rack of satin dresses and pointy shoes, with nowhere to be. When I am spending my time with friends, joking and laughing. When I go out in nature, to restaurants, the beach. Those are the places where I start feeling more like myself. What are yours?

What do you want that you have never said out loud? Don’t just write down something that sounds impressive. What do you really want? What excites you?

Whose voice is loudest when you make decisions? Whose approval do you seek the most? When you try to make yourself more palatable, whose disapproval are you trying to avoid?

What have you been told about yourself that you have never questioned? What have you been told about yourself that you’ve accepted without really questioning it?

Remember that this isn’t about tearing yourself apart but beginning to understand yourself on a deeper level.

[Part 5] Becoming

Becoming yourself is a slow process because you don’t just wake up one morning and suddenly know who you are.

You don’t need to become someone “new,” you just need to learn how to stop abandoning yourself.

“hot girl”

She can be afraid, but she never gives up on herself because she knows she’s worth it 💗

This is the end of issue 001 of the Hot Girl Curriculum!

Please show up for yourself ♡

With endless love,

Chelsea ❤︎

References

Definition of PERFORM. (n.d.). Www.merriam-Webster.com. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/perform

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