One foggy Southern California beach-city morning, the kind with mist that was never in the forecast, I'm sitting in a Target pickup spot, waiting for my order. I'm not doing my own grocery shopping this season; I'm relying on pickups. My German Shepherd is in the back. It's a good morning. Not much going on in my head, not much anxiety, which is kind of my benchmark for great right now.
I open the podcast app to queue something up while I wait, and I notice a new episode from Arielle Lorre: "Stassi Schroeder on Beauty, Confidence & How She Got Hotter in Her 30's." I don't press play. I don't listen. Something in the title just sticks. The way a random thing leads you almost to an epiphany, and you don't understand how you got from A to B, you just know you're thinking about B.
"Hotter in her thirties." And I assume, immediately, that a lot of it has to do with finally believing you're worth it, even if Stassi isn't naming it specifically or directly.
My therapist has been working on this with me for months, helping me understand that I count too. Are you surprised to hear there's a lot of people-pleasing in me?
I remember the specific time she said it. I was making excuses for someone who'd wronged me, same as always. She stopped me: "You count too." Tears welled up before my brain even caught the words. My body knew before I did.
It's not only the big version either, the kind that shows up in a therapist's office. It's the smaller one too, the one most people miss, like whether you actually have a preference about where to eat. And you might find, maybe surprisingly to yourself, that there's actually an answer underneath the "it doesn't matter" or "whatever you want" you say knee-jerk, without thinking.
It happens something like this: it's 9am, and my phone lights up. A friend who's been calling at all hours this week, going through something hard enough that I always pick up. I'm mid-blowout, Dyson already running. Do I turn it off? Or do I let it run, and tell her I can't talk right now?
And even if I do call her back. Even if I finish the blowout, and call her back ten minutes later, that was never really the problem. Because if she needs three hours, I give her three hours. Even if I only had thirty minutes. Even if I don't have the emotional capacity left, I'll dig and find it somewhere, some reserve I didn't know was still there. And by the end of the day I'm drained in the completely unsurprising way: my Billy Blanks Tae Bo YouTube video, pushed off for another day, because I already ran a marathon before 7pm without meaning to.
Underneath all of that is the harder thing to admit: when I actually take inventory of my time, I don't value myself enough to allocate any of it inward. I will drain myself dry, and then keep going past that, running on fumes. From the outside it looks like selfless giving. Inside, it's a complete breakdown of self-worth.
Getting hotter in your thirties was never about the workout, or the beauty habits, or whatever Stassi says or doesn't say in that episode I still haven't listened to. It's learning that you don't have to run on fumes for everything that pertains to you. That you're allowed to keep some of the gas in the tank for yourself.
No one thinks it in plain English: I'm not worthy enough to spend time doing this workout. But you make the comparison anyway, without ever naming it: your time, against whatever's going on in her life.
I get back from Target and put the groceries away. My dog jogs inside from our little outing. I go to press play on the episode, but something stops me. I need to find my own version of this first. There's a day coming where I'll sit down and listen to everything Stassi has to say. But not today. Today I've got to fill my own tank, and figure out what actually goes into it. I've got to start asking the questions. And from there, however slowly, find the answers.