Really Good, Actually(57)

I checked my email for something from Jon. As usual there was nothing. I ignored a message from my sister and several from students. Below my new emails was one Emotional Lauren had sent after trivia, containing a list of therapists she had compiled, in case I was looking for myself, alone. I opened my spam folder and clicked through the usual mix of newsletters, phishing scams, and branded content.

I cycled through a few blogs and websites I liked to waste time on and let a series of seemingly unconnected words wash over me: Twelve of the Best Vases; Experience: I Got Seasick on Dry Land; These Women Are Defying What It Means to Have Cancer in Taiwan. I looked at vintage chairs and pictures of women before and after a specific type of noninvasive neck lift. I ate a third yogurt and looked at more neck lifts.

I had not mentioned my recent fascination with cosmetic surgery to anyone, though since New Year’s it had taken up an increasingly large portion of my waking thoughts. Although I always sought information about it on Incognito Mode, my phone (“the algorithm”?) had figured it out anyway, so my feed was saturated with alluring images of expensive medical procedures that made women in their forties and fifties look ten years younger merely by cutting their faces off and sewing them back on higher up. I knew I was not supposed to be interested in this kind of thing, that it was possibly unfeminist and definitely unhealthy, but I couldn’t stop myself. I’d bookmarked all sorts of treatments: a little pen that burned you over and over, activating some tightening impulse in the skin; injections to dissolve a double chin or fill under-eye hollows; an incredibly tempting grafting process that promised to take fat from one place in the body and put it somewhere fat was more allowed to be.

I thought about it for a long time and concluded that, even leaving aside the issue of my self-esteem, my life would be easier in almost every way if I had just smaller upper arms. I didn’t invent beauty standards, and I would not take them down on my own simply by existing and sometimes posting photos of myself “unapologetically” baring various body parts. The few times in my life when I had been conventionally thin, the change had been immediate: people were nicer, clothing myself was easier, people on the street stopped making weird comments about my body. The world opened to me. Because of twenty pounds! How was it possible? Why not buy into bullshit beauty conventions, if doing so carried such rewards? Yes, the trends cycled in and out—things had happened with desired ass size in my lifetime that I’d never dreamed possible as a large, awkward adolescent—but I was tired of waiting for my exact body type (innkeeper’s wife in bawdy eighteenth-century cartoon) to come into fashion. If thin privilege was so arbitrary, why couldn’t I just . . . have it.

I started running the numbers: a few thousand dollars, plus a month or so of healing time, and nobody would ever be rude to me in an Aritzia again. For the cost of a weeklong stay at a midtier Mexican resort, I would never have to manage my double chin in another photo, surely a state of affairs more relaxing than any holiday. What was the point of saving for, like, a car, when I could have inarguably perfect tit texture? Was it so wrong to want to buy back a little ease in this life, or to define ease as “thighs made perfect via the application of highly concentrated radio waves”? Would it not be easier, all things considered, to recover from surgery for one six-month period than to struggle with buying pants for the rest of my life? Basically, it seemed like a very good investment.

I could see I was entering a Bad Area. What was worse, I knew that I had brought this on myself. I’d recently followed dozens of professionally beautiful women on Instagram. Thin, stylish influencers—actors’ children, or dancers, or vintage pickers from banking dynasties—with full lips and pert, somehow glowing noses, who were always doing something perfect and ten degrees off-kilter: eating lavender marmalade from a wonky goblet, say, or wearing two brioche buns as a bra. I scrolled through my new friends and experienced mild body dysmorphia and thought, Jesus, am I going to buy lace gloves?

I’d had to follow a bunch of strangers, because everyone I knew in real life was aging, disconcertingly and before my eyes, which presented the uncomfortable possibility that I was doing the same, that sometimes someone I didn’t know anymore saw my photos and thought, yikes, time sure is passing, even if I posted it because I thought I looked great, maybe even very supple. It seemed impossible that I was supposed to keep loving—even revering—my body as it decomposed in slow motion. Why not give in and have low self-esteem? Maybe I could slay in that way instead. Inspiring: This Woman Hates Herself.

You can see how I ended up at the Instagram Women. They had a lot to teach me (that you could turn a sweater into a crop top by tucking it into a belt; how much stuff there was to do to curly hair), which was convenient because I needed guidance. I had been striking out hard on the apps of late, a situation Amy—my only friend, or at least the only person returning my texts—attributed to my being a bit intense lately, tb-totally-h!! Nobody on Instagram was intense; they focused on the positive and owned milk frothers. I made careful study (and bought a low-quality whisk). From what I could gather, men loved women who were creative but not interesting. Women loved women who knew how to style twelve different earrings per lobe.

I opened Instagram and watched one of my Professional Thins explain how she was living her dream life, traveling the world with her boyfriend in an old school bus they had turned into a tiny house. I found it hard to believe anybody’s dream life involved a bathroom where the shower and toilet were the same thing.