beauty standards – One Rabbit Riot

I’d say this photo, featured above accurately represents how I feel in situations like going to the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) to renew my driver’s license. It’s a blur of moments, faces, government jargon, and touch screens. The big stack of papers signed and passed along in the process of closing on a house is more etched in my brain than the 20 minutes at my local DMV location. There is something about the dull, harsh lighting and bland walls covered in bulletins, electronic screens, and directions. It’s overstimulating and yet underwhelming. It is not a place I feel comfortable in.

This feeling began many years ago during the driver’s permit test process, in a different DMV, equally dull and filled with too many signs and screens. There was always one piece of information I was missing. A document my mom and I forgot, or a process out of order. The test was deceptively easy to study and terrifyingly tricky when taken, and I almost missed too many answers due to the sheer amount of distraction of the dull yet harsh environment.

This time, was one of those such times. Renewing in 2017 was easy, it was a new DMV with friendly people. Renewing in 2021 was an absolute breeze because there was no need to go in for the photo, just click and pay at home. It spoiled me. Renewing this time in 2025 was one of those DMV experiences fraught with tricky trip-ups.

Not surprising for me, it’s been a place I have been thwarted for years, from nervously failing the parallel park portion because I was afraid of my test proctor and his gruff demeanor or forgetting to keep my permit up-to-date and having to renew to test to wait four months for another testing time. The government process is nothing if not inefficient and a war of attrition.

The gauntlet was thrown down. Waiting for Christmas and New Year to pass, I renewed my license online and got stuck in a loop of changing my address. I then could not reach the process to renew anymore, because it was updating my address. So I mailed my renewal and waited. I then received two separate address updates for the license set to expire, but no update on my renewal.

Two weeks passed and I began to anxiously check the internet for a timeline – usually within 15 business days. Oh no, business days…I sent it in the mail on Jan 2, how many days would spend in the USPS system? Then a former president passed, delaying mail service. Was renewing it a month in advance not enough?! We then checked online, showing it had been renewed. Phew! But, when? I received another piece of mail, updating my voter registration automatically, but no temporary license or camera card.

Each day as the mail came, I ran to check it like Ralphie waiting for his Little Orphan Annie secret decoder pen. I began to worry, was my license going to expire waiting for it to show? Was it all going to unravel because of the sluggish pace of the government institution? How was I going to follow behind in my car when my husband’s car went for inspection in February? Was it back to walking for me?

Then one beautiful day I heard the mailbox close with a slam (it’s a very old cast iron mailbox), I scurried from my work room and descended the stairs with the promise of the future in my eyes. My delight was palpable as my hand pulled a DMV envelope from the mailbox. The envelope tore with ease, revealing the temporary license and camera card in my hands. All was saved!

On the next good weather weekend (it’s been a winter of snow squalls) we made our way to the DMV for the last battle left, the camera portion. Now as a shy person, this is the part that still makes me want to recoil. I never liked picture day at school. When a camera is pointed at me I can’t smile normally. I feel like a spotlight bears down upon me, filling me with dread. My smile looks unnatural, sometimes like a grimace if I smile with teeth. If I smile with a closed mouth like I did throughout my braces era, it looks uncomfortable, my shyness written across my face.

Filled with shyness, I sallied forth, pulling my ticket in preparation for a long wait. To my surprise, my number was called immediately and I had to go to a completely separate area, by myself. Something I dread in unfamiliar places. So in a flurry of adrenaline, I went into the photo room and unbeknownst to me went to the wrong side of the table to sit down. The DMV lady shouted at me, my face immediately turning red. Embarrassed and ashamed at my accident, my apologies flowed forth. She continued to scold me in front of the other citizens there to get their photo. It was incredibly awkward.

She was sweet to the other people and continued to speak to me with contempt, even though I continued to apologize for my mistake. I was flustered. Ripping my paperwork and not knowing where to go. Soon the others in front of me were served. It was my time to smile but to be honest, I was so embarrassed and concerned they were going to remove me as a security threat, I knew that wasn’t going to be possible.

Then the weirdest thing happened the lady switched from harsh to calm, saying she needed to yell at me for the camera on the ceiling or she would face consequences. (What? That’s bizarre.) It was tough to trust the nice demeanor, was she going to snap at me again if I made another mistake?

At that point, I was introvert drained from the drama, and wanted to hide. My posture could not hide my internal feelings as I sat down in front of the camera. Flash, the first picture snapped displaying a red-faced blank expression. She offered me a retake and snap, and a turtle-necked miserable-looking photo appeared on screen. I believe she offered me another retake but my mind was far away.

I continued to make mistakes, including selecting Arabic on my screen to fill out a few more things for completion. As she handed me my card, she apologized finally for scaring me, which I appreciated and I wished her a good day. I looked at my ID card and was horrified, the person doesn’t even look like me. The bottom half of the image is stretched out, compared to my photo from 2017 it looks like I aged and let myself go from how distorted the image is from what I saw on the screen.

It was the cherry bomb on top of the 2025 battle: DMV vs. Shy Girl.

I’ve tried to remind myself that what is important is that I did it, I didn’t cry when shouted at, and I didn’t give into my anxiety and bail. I did it and persevered, the bad picture happened but it doesn’t reflect what I actually look like and no one is really going to see it. But dang, what an awful experience! I think why the new picture feels like such a jump scare is it is all my fears wrapped up into one – aging and looking ugly and fat. My culture is obsessed with thinness and beauty. Plastic surgery is becoming normalized and it is sickening how vain we all are becoming. I forgot to do my hair, I didn’t wear foundation just a little eyeliner, and I forgot to gua sha.

The picture was just me and things out of my control like getting scolded, bad lighting, and a stretched image created something without beauty, because beauty is not the goal for the DMV, it is clinical and for the process of identification. It is a stark contrast to the world of filters, good lighting, and curated perfection fed to us in this current age. Seeing that ugly image, rocked my confidence because even though I find my worth in Christ, I still live in this fallen world that equates beauty and youth with virtue and worth. So what happens when life happens and time passes? We become older, we gain weight and no longer look like the size 2 self from our teen years?

Is everything past that point worthless? I realized, as I looked at the image of my expired license and the new one that having the same picture for two renewals, warped my view of how I am aging. The younger version also was far more curated as a coping mechanism. I used to be a stickler for straightening my hair, wearing makeup, jewelry, and food restriction to be in the beauty standard to blend in, like an outer shell. Protective, candy-coated.

But the younger version of myself would have been unable to cope with a stranger yelling at me without crying and shutting down. Any picture of myself I saw as ugly, I had no confidence even at my skinniest. All the things that have happened since 2017 – loss of loved ones, getting shunned by family members, reconnecting with my dad and his family only to get hurt again, losing my place to live, having nowhere to live, and crashing in people’s guest rooms for a few weeks, moving to Georgia and back, subsequent moves out of sketchy landlord situations, my first job, my first layoff in a global pandemic, etc.

It’s been a lot and through that process, I grew character and began to unmask. So what if I don’t look the same as I did in 2017? I thought I looked ugly and fat in my 2017 ID photo and was ashamed. It’s just a photo on a driver’s license card. I like the person God has shaped me to be more now in 2024, than the person who was lost and far from God in 2017. Cheers to growth!

Rude Awakening

So I knew I would not find exactly what I was looking for because I was inspired by the offerings of Korean brands YesStyle and Acubi Club, and American fashion is different. I also knew that the reflection in the mirror would not look like what the photos looked like because I’m Irish-German-Canadian and not Korean, I am built differently. That was fine. I’m also not the same size as most K-pop idols because I’m not in my late teens-early twenties, plus the addition of age, stress, and developing intolerance to milk and casein protein, my body put on some weight. I’m not happy about it but I’m working on it so that I can lose the weight and keep it off.

With all that in mind, I forgot that there has been a shift in the desired body type since the last time I bought jeans. Slim-thick and curvy hips are out, heroin chic is in. Yikes. I say yikes because the last time this body type was during the y2k era and 2000s, but at least we had stretchy hip hugger jeans. Some of these jeans I tried on that were for Fall 2023 had the 1990s baggy shape but with ridged denim and were cut exclusively for a straight up and down body shape. One of the stores I found the most disappointing was Aeropostale. Now I know this is skewed to junior’s sizing, but it had the most potential because of the aesthetic of the styles they advertized across their store. There is an Acubi and K-fashion vibe to it, including a variety of cargo pants, compared to American Eagle which was also at my outlet but had an entirely different aesthetic. But, Aeropostale was frustrating for one reason alone – inconsistent sizing.

As I combed through the denim offerings, looking for the biggest size to have the most oversized look I could, I overheard a group of high schoolers who had just tried on jeans and were worriedly sifting through the pants for a bigger size. Two to three sizes bigger as the very slim teenagers worried nothing was going to fit them. I should have heeded this warning, but instead I loaded my arm with options and headed to the dressing room, much like Mort as he scampers, unaware up the beach as the shark tried to bite him.

It did not go well. One pair I got somewhat on my body but it was nowhere near close to zippering. The other ones simply would not go over my thighs, the so-called baggy jeans feeling a lot more like a recycled mom jeans pattern from 2019 instead of the baggy skater jeans of the late 1990s and early 2000s. (Trust me, I remember wearing both and the mom jeans were heckin’ uncomfortable.)

Confidence in Tatters

I kept calm and carried on to Wrangler which was a mistake because the women’s jeans were fitted, hourglass-shaped, and no longer stretchy. Can someone explain how curve-hugging jeans are supposed to do that when they are rigid denim? Anyways. The men’s jeans fit fine, but not what I was looking for. With the wind out of my sails, Kyle suggested Old Navy. At this point, I was afraid of jeans and women’s sizing. As I walked through Old Navy I grabbed sizes bigger than I ever tried before, grasping at straws in hopes that something would work. Ironically last season’s jeans gave me what I was looking for. I found success in the clearance section and purchased my Acubi-style jeans for $10. It was a screamin’ deal. It also was an ego gut punch as I bought jeans three sizes up from where I thought I would be. I selected two pairs and they are each a different size yet they fit me the same. Please, make it make sense!

Although I was happy to have found a style dupe, I felt this sense of dread about the other pants in my wardrobe. Was it the clothing or had my body changed again? Were my handcrafted, self-drafted, un-sized clothing pieces wrecking my ability to feel comfortable in standardized sizing? It left me in a terrible headspace where I pinballed between unworthiness and an unhinged desire to punish my body with intense workouts and restrictive diets. All over vanity. I don’t like how easily I put my worth in my outward appearance. This trivial experience weighed on my mind and affected my August.

I no longer wanted to catalog styling my handmade pieces. I felt like hiding from the blog as my inner monologue was pretty nasty towards myself, I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin. I just wanted to hide until I could force my body into the current shape of the moment. I felt old and fat. I’m neither of those things, but the inner critic consumed me.

The Plan

For the next week, I pushed myself to dial back my bad habits, portion down my plate, and cut back on sweets. I took it a little too far and had to let myself have a cookie because I realized I was spiraling to a really unhealthy place where I believed I needed to earn my food (90s American diet culture, anyone?)

One positive that came from this diet push was to break free from the fear of tracking my calories burned and distance on the exercise bike, instead of it being restrictive I found it motivating. I even reached a pace of 3 min/mile. It was so exciting! The experience showed me that I needed to make simple swaps because my cardio was good and the muscles underneath some of my chubby bits were getting strong, I just needed to tone and get leaner.

Now of course, just as we make progress in life, discouragement rears its ugly head. I cut my leg on the bike so I had to pause riding for a week, which of course broke the habit I built. I began lifting the set of weights we had for exercise instead and hit myself on the shoulder. I got an angry ingrown toenail making my planks painful and a stomach bug to boot. All in the span of 10 days, life is good. But in the meantime I started doing wall sits every day and planks most days. I can do a wall sit for 1 minute to 1 minute and 30 seconds. My plank time has also increased from 30 seconds to a minute. My posture is improving, my mind is growing stronger, and I am seeing results in my arms, legs, and waistline. I don’t mind the portion control at all actually I’ve enjoyed getting healthier and eating more fruit like bananas with my oatmeal. Popcorn is my go-to evening snack and I let myself have a piece of dark chocolate or two in the afternoon slump.

I feel agency again in my own body. I’ve learned that the weight I put on is not out of my control, and I can change the shape of my body with discipline, not restriction and punishment. Exercising is more of a mental thing than a physical task, and when I am struggling to stay motivated to push myself I remind myself that I can do anything for 30 seconds. I’m going to apply that mindset to life when it gets scary.