I really want to cry because I feel like for my entire life I have thought of beauty all wrong. Especially in my teens, and even more during my internalized misogyny manosphere era of my early 20s because I was studying engineering.

True, I am still objectively ugly because of several features on my face, but I'm not a horrible irredeemable goblin like I thought I was. I realized I was missing two major, important, pieces to the beauty equation: confidence/game and makeup.

I thought I had already softmaxxed since I have good hair and healthy body. But there's still so much more to it. I realize I haven't been taking care of myself at all, because what I believed about beauty was all wrong. I thought that because my facial features weren't perfect, there's no point in trying. But today I learned, after spending 10 hours reading everything on the FDS sidebar:

Physical appearance is not the same as attractiveness.

Just because your genetics doesn't give you the perfect instagram model face, doesn't mean you're not beautiful or magnetic. And I consider myself already quite charming and charismatic, because luckily enough my reaction to believing I was physically ugly lead me to "overcompensate with my personality" and be an interesting person, whereas that same belief lead me to totally giving up on my appearance. Now I see you can also beauty max, by ACTING and BELIEVING you are infinitely valuable. I used to look up to these beauty vloggers like, "they must have something I don't have" and I used to attribute it to genetics or confidence, or the tautology of "they're confident because they're born beautiful"

the real pill is knowing you're already valuable, you just never noticed it if you were always fixated on lack.

And also, I approached men with the apologetic mindset of "I'm really ugly, yes, I'm valueless, please give me a chance" so they treat me like dirt, so then it reinforces my belief that I really am valueless and ugly. That's because men take it at face value, if you believe you're worthless they agree with you. Actually! I think the better explanation now, is they treated me badly not because I'm ugly, but because I gave off the aura that I was valueless. Who would want someone worthless as a wife? Of course you treat the worthless chick who is convenient like trash.

Everything is coming together, and now I feel like I "know" what that intangible quality is that those beautiful people "have" that I didn't, and it was this new understanding.

I guess this happened because reading the whole dating strategy handbook, made me realize how I acted to men ("the energy I put out") resulted in poor results ("the energy you receive"), that I mistakenly attributed to being physically unaesthetic.

Actually, the results were due to believing that I was ugly, not because I was ugly.

Secondly, after I read the REAL purpose of being pretty and beautifying yourself (to be a high value woman) and not the way I've been taught growing up (makeup is a waste of time/for superficial people) I looked up some videos to put on makeup for the kind of features I had that I thought can only be fixed with surgery, when I realized, the woman giving the tutorial doesn't look that bad at all! And without makeup, she sort of looks like me! I don't know if that's just the human fallacy of thinking you're more attractive than you really are, but I'm not as horrible of a goblin as I think I am. It is still good that my upbringing focused away from my physical appearance, and I am glad that I became a well rounded person, because I think possibly if I was introduced to physical beauty at a younger age like putting on make up and dressing up, I would have only attracted superficial predators or based my self esteem on my appearance, and I really needed to complete this character arc first. To really understand confidence, value, worth, effort, attention and all that stuff, or else I would have ended up vying and being needy by using my physical appearance for validation.

I think I am one step closer to analytically teasing out what is that "it" is when I see someone beautiful and think, "she just has 'it' and I don't" and it both is and isn't the confidence I was lead to believe. This "it" thing some people just seem to intuitively understand from a young age. It's this deeper sort of "knowing" from the bottom of your heart that you are valuable. I think that a lot of situations happened in life and the meaning I ascribed to it was all wrong. Or at least now, I have a different and perhaps better meaning I can use to explain things, that would improve life even more now.

Recently though, I think my confidence has been overblown by the new thought that, "one day a guy is going to see me and think, 'that is my future wife'" because I learned that men size you up when they first see you, you don't need to "put work" into convincing him to love you as I used to think, especially with the ugly mindset (god I bet there could be a book on ugly mindset vs beauty mindset) that I have to convince him to settle for me because I wouldn't be able to get his attention with my appearance. Now I am starting to think, it's not about your physical appearance, it's about having "it" and the physical appearance can be a part of it, but not all of it.

I need to go workout soon. Because, even though I am not getting in a relationship anytime soon, I want to be a high value woman. I think someday a man is going to see my exact face and know I am the one and the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, and all of my antics are cute and not cringe. Sorry if this isn't going to be very popular on a femcel forum, but I feel like this is the third pill. Like, the first pill is assuming everything is about looks. The second pill is realizing your life has been shitty because you are ugly. But now the third pill is "what you believed about beauty, attraction and love is all wrong"

I am even starting to think that even though or BECAUSE I am ugly, it is not true that a man is not going to settle/never love me, in fact, there are plenty of beautiful women who get rejected. Having unique features would actually make me stand out. I wonder if I'm just delusional though haha. And I am now suddenly also grateful for my parents, because I think even though I lacked "it" they still tried to build me up all along to show me that I have value by investing in me, until I realize my own value.

Now that I realize this thing about "it" and having value, I suddenly feel a compulsion to actually take better care of myself instead of thinking it's a lost cause/waste of time why bother. Every time you take care of yourself, you are adding even more value to yourself. I think that's why for women, men fall in love with them at first sight. They already did all the work ahead of time by beautifying themselves. It's up to men to earn their right to love us. I have had the equation and thought process backwards by thinking, "because I am ugly I'll need to convince him to settle for me and probably spend years strung along"

I suppose now that I start reading the post from the beginning, what I wanted to say was that I just feel really sorry for myself because I was the one holding myself back all along. I could have began the process of beautifying myself long ago if I had learned that it was about "it" and not about physical appearance.