You pretend you don't care about your appearance. You care so much it's eating you from the inside.

You avoid your reflection in store windows.

You angle the camera up. Delete seventeen photos. Post the eighteenth with a filter.

You say you don't care how you look.

Your behavior says otherwise.

Every outfit choice is a negotiation with the version of yourself you wish you saw.

Every party is a scan of the room to see if you're the least attractive person in it.

You do this math silently. Constantly. Without ever telling anyone.

Because admitting you care feels vain. And vain people aren't taken seriously.

So you pretend the mirror doesn't sting.

It stings. Every time.

Not because you're ugly. Because someone taught you that your value lives on the surface.

A comment. A comparison. A glance that lasted too long or not long enough.

The wound is old. The mirror just reopens it daily.

You're not struggling with your face. You're struggling with a story someone else wrote about it.

A story that was never true but felt true because it was said during a time when you believed everything adults told you.

You believed them. You shouldn't have.

They were speaking from their own insecurities.

Their voice became your mirror.

And every time you look at yourself, you hear their narration instead of your own.

You don't hate your reflection. You hate the narrator who told you what to see. Fire them.