#and talked an inordinate amount about how all women are petty backstabbing bitches who are bad friends and men are so much better

[algolagniaa]

in Washington I had a friend who was a year older than me and who from the first time I saw her I was really struck by how attractive she was. like conventionally attractive and feminine in a way I’m usually not attracted to at all but when it was her I was because it was like enchanting ethereal beauty. and she had a lot of her identity wrapped up in how pretty she was and had a pretty big internet following based solely on thirst traps. and we were really really close friends for most of the time I lived there (she wasn’t a very good friend but that’s another story) and when I moved to California we kept in touch for a while and then shortly after her 30th birthday I tried to visit a different friend in Washington but through a series of whacky hijinx (my other friend was on meth lol) I ended up hanging out with her the whole time instead. and a lot of things happened that totally soured me on her as a person but one of them was she spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in front of her vanity trying to look pretty and she DID look pretty and I kept giving her genuine compliments but somehow everything I said made her feel worse about herself, like “omg your hair looks so pretty like that!” “yeah :( it always looks good until I move and then you can see how thin it is :(“ and then she would take about 10000 selfies and complain about how she looked in all of them and then make me take selfies with her and complain about how I looked but then also paradoxically complain that I looked better than her and then she’d post a selfie to instagram but a few hours later get upset that it only got 100 likes and take it down and cry about how she looks 30 now and men only like women who are under 30. and I remember looking at her sitting at her vanity asking me for reassurance she didn’t look 30 for the hundredth time because she never believed me when I said she didn’t and just having a moment where I saw her with new eyes and went….. oh my god you actually do look old and frail. you look like a sad old lady playing dress up. and since then that’s all that I saw when I looked at her and i can’t see the ethereal enchanting beauty I used to see even when I try and that’s a big part of why I’m such a believer in mindset affecting physical aging