Self-care and its monsters: How trusting my intuition has saved me from myself

TW: Mentions of eating disorders and intrusive thoughts

Self-care, the deliberate process to look after our mental and physical well being, has many obvious benefits. In the last decade, particularly after YouTube content creators have started to gain more prominence, self-care has come to be preached by many influencers, across multiple platforms, in an attempt to encourage people to unapologetically take time for themselves and show more love towards their own minds and bodies.

I was 15 when I started watching beauty gurus actively on YouTube. I was in awe at how experimental makeup could be and how much it could change one’s facial features. By 16, I was doing special occasion makeup on all of my acquaintances. I was 17 when I wore my first pair of fake eyelashes. And that moment changed the game. I took countless photos and kept flooding my social media accounts with pictures of that night for months afterwards. My childhood friends were giving me unrestricted compliments, one even saying — and I will never forget this particular comment — ‘how much more beautiful are you going to get? It’s annoying’.

Receiving something so blunt from someone who’d known me since we were 12 felt fuelling. It started fuelling my dive into the beauty industry and my avid…