One of the reasons I hate living in an apartment is that as soon as you walk out of your nice, cozy, PRIVATE home, you’re in PUBLIC. The door is the only buffer. Contrast that to a house, where you have this nice buffer zone of a garage and a yard, and a street, more or less. Unless you live in a bizzaro place, you don’t have people outside your house to see you should you need to get something you left in your car or take out the trash or whatever.
Not so in an apartment. Now, used to be I’d worry about my presentation all the damn time. I’d put makeup on if I knew I was getting food delivered, and put on real clothes instead of sweat pants, and generally look like I hadn’t rolled out of bed. Because, after all, everyone CARES so MUCH what I LOOK LIKE.
The nice thing about getting older (and wiser… *sips coffee*) is that you begin to care less and less about what other people think. Taking a leaf from Sarah Knight and her F*cks Budget, I’ve realized that I want to spend my F*cks wisely and less liberally. And giving a F*ck about what I look like just isn’t as high a priority as, say, writing.
And let’s be clear, not putting on makeup is a big deal, when you’ve worn it every day since you were sixteen and then had a real bad flare up of adult acne when you were in Taiwan and now have the scars and shame to prove it. So makeup = armor = me being okay. But not anymore.
The other day, I’d left something in my car, to get back to the title story, and my car was parked a level above me in the parking garage. I did not put on makeup to go get the stuff. I did put on pants, because decency, but wore slippers and didn’t brush my hair, either. Yes, I was one of those people. Pretty soon I’ll be wearing pjs to Walmart. No, I won’t. It was a step in the self-love department, not the giving-up-self-hood department.
I even saw someone coming down the staircase, and they said hi. Not, oh god how could you show that face to the world, but hi. How nice. *snark intensifies*
Being an adult sucks on a lot of levels, but today it sucked a little less as I accepted myself for myself a little more. Thanks, self.
A.M. EDMONSON 
I feel this on so many levels. I still struggle with the no makeup thing, but I wear sweatpants to the store all the time now – ain’t nobody got time to put on proper pants, lol.
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Right? I feel like I’m slowly becoming more okay with being less than perfectly presentable. It’s a good feeling!
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Hahahaha. Yeah, I was actually the opposite. I didn’t like wearing makeup or was lazy to be ‘presentable’ but my mom was the one who kept pushing me towards it. But these days in Asia, yikes, I definitely feel the pressure to not be gross. Hahahaa. But yeah, I’ll take out the trash in my jammies and oily skin. I think people don’t care so much as we think they do. But if you are always looking like you rolled out of bed, then, yeah, maybe then they’d begin to wonder.
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Yeah, and there was me being jealous of people okay with being lazy! Thank goodness I’m growing up. XD
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