How it looks versus how it feels.
How much time have I wasted focusing on the wrong thing?
Earlier this year, I stumbled upon someone, somewhere talking about how much time they had wasted trying to figure out how to be more attractive. I can’t remember the exact context now, or even who the person was, if it was someone speaking in a movie or a podcast or a line from an Instagram caption, maybe. I don’t know the particulars of the thought now, whether the person was talking about weight or body shape or skin or style or hair or something else entirely, what the phrase meant to them, specifically. But I knew immediately what it meant to me. I absorbed the words right away, felt all that time like it was falling right into my lap, the start of a rainstorm. A sprinkle at first — minutes, hours, days. Then a downpour as I added it all up — months? Years? All that time trying to figure out how to be hotter, prettier, sexier, drowning in it, when I could have been thinking about anything else.
I’ve written about this a little bit this year, about what it feels like to navigate b…