The Cost of Wanting to be Wanted

I couldn’t have named it at the time, but I’ve sold my soul in the name of feeling worthy.

For me, this translated to being pretty enough.
Pretty enough meant being accepted.
Being accepted meant feeling wanted.
Feeling wanted meant feeling chosen.
Being chosen mattered.

It’s hard to admit just how deep this runs.
Especially as someone who spends her days talking about growth, about self-trust, about empowerment and healing.

I know this terrain. I’ve mapped a lot of it. But this one…this one is somehow only just now baring its fangs.

I am realizing it was there all along, only dormant.

I try to name what’s been sleeping in the shadows:

An aunt who used to lovingly call me ugly. “You’re so ugly!” she would say, meaning the exact opposite and poisoning my soul at the same time.

The boy in middle (and high school - the same one) who called me Rex, but never quite committed to calling me an actual dog, or making ugly comments. I suppose that mostly created a really concrete sense of confusion. To this day, I’m not sure I understand why that nickname. Did he think I was ugly? I’ll never know but my bones knew it wasn’t a compliment.

The boy in my 20’s who danced with me at a club, just to ask if I’d introduce him to my cousin.

These experiences planted a quiet question in me:
What if I’m not pretty enough to be loved?
And from there, I went looking for validation.

I put myself in unsafe situations. I looked in boys’ eyes, and they looked everywhere else.
I welcomed any attention, even from boys who gave me the creeps.
This wasn’t because I was boy-crazy, but because I was desperate for proof that I was desirable.

To me, desirable equaled worthy.

The cosmic joke is that when I got that attention, I didn’t even trust it.
I assumed it was a setup. That I was the butt of the joke.

A punchline was coming.

That stuff settles into the body.
It becomes the architecture.

And now visibility feels like danger.

It’s wild how old shame still sets the terms of engagement.
How something so seemingly small - an offhand nickname, a teasing phrase, a single moment on a dance floor - can anchor in a whole belief system.
And how long it can take to see it.

The work for me is simultaneously accepting it on the days it feels too hard to change, and changing it on the days I feel it calling the shots.

Sometimes I judge myself for how long it has taken me to see these patterns, or to acknowledge that these things affected me. I truly would never have described myself as someone who fell into the pitfalls of what “true beauty” should look like - meaning, the models we grew up with, and how only thin was in. I’ve always looked at all humans being beautiful in their own way, and I was never completely preoccupied with my weight.

But as I got older…like much older…the aging process has kicked in and things I never really worried about became front and center. Drier skin, more spots, more weight, coarser hair…it was a lot of things all at once, threatening the very core of fragile confidence I had built up in pieces - and at a time when becoming visible is the thing that really drives connection right now, in my work and personal life.

So what does all of this mean?

I suppose it means different things for different people.

For me right now, it means working through the realization and truth that how I look matters more than I thought, and that it mattered way back a long time ago when I didn’t think it did. That I fell a bit victim to the culture of what was considered acceptable and beautiful. That while I didn’t judge other people, I definitely judged myself. That I was not as confident and rooted in myself as I thought I was.

And that all of that is okay, and I am strong enough to make any changes that I want to, for myself, and not because other people expect it.

I tell myself that again: because I want to, and not because other people expect it.

Let this be the new current-cy that runs through me, filling me with diamonds from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.

XO - Lauren