Nobody Shows You This Part of the Glow-Up
If you search the internet for “glow-ups,” you'll find smooth skin, gym selfies, new wardrobes and some woman standing in a beautifully renovated kitchen telling you she finally became the person she was always meant to be.
Good for her.
Seriously.
But I think we've skipped over a fairly significant part of the story.
The part before anyone looks better.
Before the debt is paid.
Before the weight is lost.
Before the house is finished.
Before the business works.
Before the confidence comes back.
Before anyone is looking at your life thinking, Wow. She really turned things around.
Because I'm starting to realize that the real glow-up happens long before there's anything particularly impressive to show for it.
It's quiet.
It's gritty.
It's lonely.
It's uncomfortable.
And sometimes it's fucking terrifying.
I'm in my 40s, rebuilding parts of my life I desperately wish I'd dealt with sooner.
And this?
This is what the before picture actually looks like.
The Hardest Part Is Knowing I Should Have Done Something Sooner
There's a particular kind of discomfort that comes with looking around your own life and realizing some of the things you don't like aren't just bad luck.
Some of them are the consequences of decisions you made.
Some are decisions you avoided making.
Some are problems you knew existed and let sit for too fucking long.
That's uncomfortable to admit.
It's also true.
There are areas of my life where I wish I'd been more disciplined.
I wish I'd paid closer attention.
I wish I'd made different financial decisions.
I wish I'd trusted myself more.
I wish I'd stopped waiting for certain things to magically get better and dealt with them when they were still manageable.
I wish I'd started sooner.
Because eventually you reach the point where avoiding something becomes more painful than dealing with it.
And then you have to look around and admit:
Okay. This is where I am.
This is what I've got.
Now what the fuck am I going to do about it?
That's where I am.
Trying Again Is Different When You've Failed Before
There's another layer to rebuilding that I don't think gets talked about enough.
I've tried things before.
I've launched businesses.
I've poured ridiculous amounts of energy into ideas I genuinely believed could work.
I've imagined the future those ideas might create.
And none of them became what I hoped they would.
People love to say failure teaches you lessons.
It does.
But that's not all it does.
Failure leaves scars.
It changes the way you approach the next attempt.
The first time you try something big, there's often this slightly delusional optimism that maybe you're going to be one of those people who just fucking nails it.
Then you don't.
And the next time you try, you carry evidence with you.
Evidence that you can work really hard and still fail.
Evidence that wanting something badly doesn't guarantee you'll get it.
Evidence that your judgment isn't always right.
Evidence that you can believe in an idea with your whole chest and eventually have to admit it didn't work.
So when I tell you I'm trying to build something again, understand that I'm not doing it with unshakeable confidence.
I'm doing it with shaky confidence and receipts.
That's a very different experience.
There's a voice in the back of my head that occasionally asks:
What if this doesn't work either?
I don't have some profound answer for her.
Maybe it won't.
That's the shitty part about trying.
You don't get the guarantee first.
My Life Already Feels Full
The timing is also spectacular.
Because apparently I decided the ideal moment to seriously rebuild my life was when my life already felt approximately 97% over capacity.
I'm working.
I'm raising kids.
I'm managing a house that always seems to need something.
I'm dealing with bills that do not give a single fuck whether I'm overwhelmed.
I'm trying to get my finances under control.
I'm trying to take better care of myself.
I'm trying to be a good mother.
I'm trying to maintain relationships.
I'm trying to deal with all the ordinary administrative bullshit required to be a functioning adult.
And somewhere inside all of that, I'm trying to build something that could materially change my future.
There are days when it feels manageable.
There are days when I look at the entire list and think:
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
That's the part of the glow-up nobody puts on Pinterest.
It's not always a beautiful morning routine and a green smoothie.
Sometimes it's answering emails while the laundry needs folding, realizing something expensive in your house needs fixing and then opening your budget even though you'd rather launch your laptop directly into traffic.
It's deeply unsexy.
I'm Done Pretending Accountability and Shame Are the Same Thing
One thing I've had to figure out through all of this is how to take responsibility for my life without using that responsibility as another weapon against myself.
Because I do believe in accountability.
Strongly.
There are things in my life right now that I am responsible for.
I made decisions I regret.
I avoided some things because dealing with them was uncomfortable.
I spent money I shouldn't have spent.
I procrastinated.
I let certain problems become urgent before I dealt with them.
I knew better in some situations and did it anyway.
That's mine.
But I'm starting to understand that accountability and shame aren't the same thing.
Shame says:
Look what you did. You're such a fuck-up.
Accountability says:
Yep. That's where we are.
What are we doing about it?
I'm much more interested in the second question.
Own it. Learn from it. Fix what I can. Move.
That idea—taking back control without pretending you can fix everything at once—is something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
Because I can't go backwards and make myself start five years ago.
I can't recover every dollar I wish I'd spent differently.
I can't turn failed businesses into successful ones retroactively.
I can't unmake bad decisions.
And spending another five years punishing myself for the previous five seems like a spectacularly inefficient way to fix any of it.
What Has Surprised Me Most Is That I'm Still Standing
I don't give myself enough credit for this part.
Because while some areas of my life aren't where I want them to be, I am not the same woman I was a few years ago.
Emotionally, I've changed.
I'm less reactive.
I'm more grounded.
I'm better at sitting with uncomfortable feelings without immediately needing to make them disappear.
I recover faster.
I trust myself more.
I'm better at recognizing when something isn't right for me.
I can handle considerably more uncertainty without completely unraveling.
That doesn't mean I'm floating around my house in some state of enlightened inner peace.
I'm stressed as fuck sometimes.
There are days when everything feels manageable and others when one additional inconvenience could potentially lead to me crying because somebody put an empty milk carton back in the fridge.
Growth, apparently, has range.
But underneath all of it, something has changed.
I'm still here.
I'm still functioning.
I'm still showing up.
I'm still making plans.
I'm still trying.
I'm still convinced my life can look very different from this.
And maybe most importantly:
I haven't given up on myself.
Given everything, that feels significant.
What Nobody Shows You About a Glow-Up
I think this is the part I've misunderstood about glow-ups.
We usually see them after they've worked.
The debt is gone.
The weight is lost.
The house is beautiful.
The business succeeded.
She looks happier.
She sounds confident.
And everyone wants to know what she did.
Nobody is particularly interested in the Tuesday night six months earlier when she was sitting at her kitchen table staring at numbers she didn't like and wondering how the fuck she'd let things get this far.
Nobody photographs the moment she has to say no to something she wants because she can't afford it.
Nobody posts the failed idea.
Nobody makes a reel about the night she genuinely wonders whether she's capable of pulling off the life she's trying to build.
Nobody sees her making the same boring decision for the fiftieth time when it would be considerably easier to fall back into an old habit.
That's where I am.
I'm in the before picture.
Or maybe the during picture.
Either way, there's no dramatic reveal yet.
Some things are improving.
Some things are still a mess.
Some days I'm incredibly motivated.
Other days I would very much like to unsubscribe from adulthood.
But I'm starting to understand that this might actually be what changing your life looks like before there's any evidence you've changed it.
Maybe the Glow-Up Is the Boring Part
I've spent a lot of time thinking transformation would feel bigger.
Like there would be some moment where I decided to change my life and suddenly became the kind of woman who wakes up at 5 a.m., loves budgeting, never procrastinates, has an immaculate house and meal-preps seventeen identical containers of chicken on Sunday afternoons.
Apparently not.
Mostly, it looks like repetition.
Doing the thing you said you'd do.
Then doing it again.
Looking at the numbers.
Making the payment.
Going for the walk.
Sending the email.
Doing the work.
Saying no.
Cleaning up the mess.
Getting back on track when you inevitably get off it.
Making a slightly better decision than the one you would have made before.
And then doing that enough times that eventually your life starts looking different.
There's very little instant gratification in that.
Which is probably why the internet prefers the after picture.
I Don't Know How This Story Ends Yet
And maybe that's the most important part of writing this now.
I don't know how this story ends.
I'm not writing this from the other side.
I don't have the impressive debt-payoff screenshot.
I don't have the wildly successful business.
I don't have the perfectly finished house.
I haven't reached some magical point where I wake up every morning completely confident that everything I'm doing is going to work.
I'm still in it.
And that means I have to acknowledge something that scares me:
Some of the things I'm trying might fail.
Again.
I don't love writing that.
I would much rather tell you I've finally cracked the code and everything from here forward is one long upward trajectory.
But that wouldn't be true.
What I do know is that I'm paying attention now.
I'm making different decisions.
I'm fixing things I've avoided.
I'm asking harder questions.
I'm trying again.
Not because I suddenly became fearless.
Because I'm more afraid of what my life looks like five years from now if I don't.
Maybe someday I'll look back at this period and barely recognize the woman living it.
Maybe I'll have the financial security I want.
Maybe the thing I'm building will have become something bigger than I can currently imagine.
Maybe my house will finally stop needing something for five fucking minutes.
Maybe I'll feel incredibly proud of how far I've come.
I hope so.
But if that happens, I don't want to rewrite the story and pretend I knew all along that I would succeed.
I don't know that now.
Right now, I'm tired.
I'm scared sometimes.
I'm behind in places I don't want to be behind.
I'm fixing mistakes I wish I hadn't made.
I'm trying things without knowing whether they'll work.
And I'm doing it anyway.
Maybe people will eventually look at the after picture and call it a glow-up.
That's fine.
But I'll know where it actually started.
It didn't start when everything finally looked better.
It started here… when quite a lot of it still looked like shit and I decided to do something about it anyway.
XOXO,
That Mama