Courtesy of subject Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story The scale read nearly the same weight I had been when my husband and I first met 20 years ago, and nearly the same number I had once spent years clawing towards, the number I had injected myself with off-brand Ozempic for three months trying to reach, white-knuckling my way toward something I was convinced would finally make me feel like myself. And here it was, arrived without effort, or deprivation. The body, it turns out, knows how to find its place once you stop punishing it into submission.
It was not always this way. For most of my life I believed something was fundamentally wrong with me, and I spent decades trying to correct it from the outside in. During my teenage years I was consumed with looking like an all-American girl, despite being Asian and knowing that I simply could not replicate that standard naturally. In the ‘90s, I bought Covergirl cosmetics religiously. I wore eye shadows to make my eyes appear bigger, rounder, more Western. I wanted foundation that would lighten my skin, concealer to make my nose look thinner. I slowly hijacked my mother’s makeup box, scoured thrift stores for clothes that would create curves where there were none. And the pattern that began there never really stopped. In my mind, there was always something wrong with me: I was too skinny, then too fat, too flat-chested, not tall enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not likable enough. That sense of inadequacy grew inside me until it became indistinguishable from my own identity.
Arrow My remedy for this was to negate every physical item on that list. In my 20s, I wore heavy makeup, push-up bras, five-inch heels, and seriously considered getting a boob job . In my 30s, I obsessed over mini- facials , lash lifts , brow laminations , and microblading —which was great until one session where the artist went full throttle on my brows, launching a two-year obsession with removal using painful lasers and acids. In my 40s, the needle entered the picture. Botox, fillers, compounded semaglutide; I even thought I was in need of a facelift . I remember looking at my Amex bill every month, watching the dollars climb into the thousands, and feeling strangely and profoundly underwhelmed with myself. I looked in the mirror and saw someone who had done a great deal of work to look like a slightly better version of her anxiety. That’s when I began to suspect the problem was deeper than the surface.
Illustration by Mark Baker-Sanchez/Allure; Photo: Adobe Stock
My experiment began on my birthday, over a year ago, in a perfectly neutral medical office in the middle of the Upper East Side, where the stark white walls intermingled with the dull gray cabinetry and trim, precise and professional in their sterility. Sitting in the designer cushioned chair, I looked around at faces with muted expressions, most likely paralyzed mid-feeling by Botox . My doctor, a pregnant Asian woman also in her 40s, looked oddly like a teenager carrying her own baby to term. She was the walking billboard for what she performed, with skin so clear and smooth it seemed digitally rendered. Looking at her, the absolute pinnacle of youthful perfection, I realized I didn’t actually want to resemble that anymore.
She was a frozen clock—a face I would have liked to know, but stripped of the marks of time, there was nothing left on it worth knowing. So, when her office emailed to confirm my next filler appointm…