I'm sure most of you amazing women here have also heard of the subreddit "Vindicta." It's supposed to be a group that focuses on how to level up your physical beauty.

I joined that group a while back, thinking that it will help me. It did the complete opposite and made me start scrutinising every inch of my face. I started finding parts of me that I could never fix without surgery (which is a route I refuse to go down) and I ended up crying myself to sleep some nights. These were parts of me that I never paid attention to before Vindicta, parts of me that I never thought contributed to how attractive someone was.

Eventually, I realised that part of being beautiful is to embrace your flaws. It's impossible for me to be perfect physically in every way possible and making it my goal to be physically perfect is a sign of severe BDD (a mental illness). So I quit.

BUT the unfortunate thing is that even though I quit three weeks ago, I still look in the mirror and see all the flaws I didn't know I had before Vindicta.

I know I'm putting WAY too much of my self-worth on physical beauty and I'm still trying to work on that (I've got an awesome personality if I say so myself :D) but as women, it's not easy for us to shift that self-worth to our intelligence and personality. We're taught that even if we're intelligent, funny, kind, generous, whatever, we have to be beautiful above all. That too NATURALLY beautiful. If we're ugly, we're told to get cosmetic surgery and if we get cosmetic surgery, we're laughed at because "hey, look at that girl over there who is naturally beautiful when you had to pay 20k to look this way." I don't even want to get started on how homogenised beauty standards are. I don't want to live in a world where women feel the need to risk their lives to be prettier, thinking it's going to get them ahead in life. But look at that, that's the fucking world we live in...

One of my saddest memories with my mom is when I was trying to finish a 10k puzzle of Van Gogh's Starry Night (really proud of that hehe, I finished it just last month) and we were talking about the friends I met up with a day earlier. I told my mom that I hadn't expected everyone to show up with full faces of make up and cute outfits -- I was under the impression it was going to be like a slumber party. I told her how insecure I felt there and my mom instantly said, "The most amazing feeling for any woman if she walks into a room and simply knows that she's the more beautiful than everyone else in that room." We're all conditioned to think that physical beauty is the most important thing. But we need to break out of that cycle.

Funny enough, when it comes to men, my mom has always said to never pay attention to how a man LOOKS but rather pay attention to how he BEHAVES. I agree with this but it's sad seeing the double standard against women.

So this is a warning to everyone spending far too much time scrutinising themselves in the mirror. Place most of your self-worth on what you are on the inside. You're all QUEENS no matter what you look like so keep your head high and your self-esteem in the sky. Because, don't forget, the more insecure you are, the easier it is for LVM/NVM to manipulate you because you become vulnerable.