I take my hair out of the bun I had it in on the plane, first noticing that it’s dark blond with highlights instead of the icy blond it was when I left. When I let it down, I find that it’s also much longer, falling just past my shoulders with long layers. It appears not to have been bleached over and over, and is instead soft and healthy. I guess K18 and Olaplex can only go so far.

I can’t help but notice that it looks kind of amazing. People always tell me I have the face for short hair, so I never let it grow. But it looks like I should have.

What the hell is going on?

Wait. Does that mean…?

I tear off my coat and look at my body in the full-length mirror. My body, which has gained back the twenty pounds I’ve spent the last few years staving off by eating unsalted fish and calling an annual square of dark chocolate an indulgence.

I take in the softer stomach and sloping waist. I don’t have the tightly snatched look I’ve grown used to. I even have boobs again. Maybe a full D cup, like I used to be before I started checking every nutritional label.

Huh.

If most celebrities I know looked in the mirror and saw the effects of their tireless hours on the Peloton vanish into thin air, they’d scream. Perhaps spontaneously combust. I feel fascinated. And for some reason, a little relaxed.

When you’re “perfect,” you never truly are. You don’t cross a finish line of hotness. It’s a constant battle of maintenance that involves constant failure, and the goalposts are perpetually moving. The filler fad is replaced by the newly chic dissolving of filler, but people still want to improve their natural appearance, so it’s all plasma injections and red light therapy from then on out until they discover that red light actually speeds up aging, and then everyone moves onto an all-cigarette diet or something. It did wonders in the nineties, they’ll say, forgetting why we weren’t smoking.

Plus, everyone out there is watching for you to let it all slip. For fuck’s sake, that time the paparazzi snapped the pictures where everyone thought I was pregnant? I had an underweight BMI and had been on a diet of room-temperature water and fermented cabbage for a week for a magazine shoot. Why did the water have to be room temp? I don’t know. That was just the advice I was given. Despite the improvement in the realm of body acceptance, there is still a projection in our society of the internalized standards that have been imprinted upon us for generations. No celebrity can go from 118 pounds to 132 without it getting noticed—even if it’s with a passive-aggressive headline like Ana Di Armas Embraces Natural Curves!