Question and answer website Quora features a popular thread in which people talk about their transformative experiences after maturing from average looking to attractive. The answers they give are frank, compelling, and beautiful in there own right.
Here’s a great example of the type of experiences being shared by Quora users in the popular thread.
“I have two personalities now.”
“My appearance changed quite dramatically from high school to college. My hair calmed down, my skin cleared up, I grew into my gangly, awkward body, I lost the baby fat on my face, and I finally started taking care of my crazy eyebrows. Growing up, I was a nerd. I didn’t have many friends, and most of my time was spent alone in my room working on electronics projects, programming, playing guitar or video games.
“After I matured, I started going to the gym, and my appearance started changing, I noticed quite a few changes in my lifestyle and how people treated me.”
What changed for her?
No longer a wallflower: People started looking at me when I walked around and taking notice of my presence. This was weird and unnerving.
Making Friends Become Easy: I didn’t even have to make an effort. I was still weird and offensive and I STILL made friends. I started getting invited to a lot of events and parties. I felt like socializing and going to parties was the “cool” thing to do, and the thing I should do and take advantage of.
Attention To Details Increase: Girls started to pay a lot of attention to what I’m wearing, my makeup, accessories, blah blah. This is weird. I don’t normally notice this stuff on other girls. And I still don’t really know how to use makeup that well, but if I have to go to an event or do a photo shoot or something, there’s usually someone around that can do it for me.
Two personalities: One is my real self, which is who my friends and coworkers know, and who makes super nerdy jokes, is wildly inappropriate, and very morbid. The second is the personality I put on for non-technical social situations. No one is going to get my nerdy jokes, even though they may be the first things I think of…
Another Quora user proclaims:
“My mom who couldn’t recognize me…”
This Quora user lost 120 pounds and says his mom wouldn’t even recognize him. Rastislav Turek writes in his response:
“I never cared much about how do I look, but of course many things changed for me. I never had an issue to find a girlfriend (as I think it has more to do with your confidence than with your body), but before the change I’ve never experienced a situation where a woman asked me for a date.The weirdest reaction I ever experienced was from my mom who couldn’t recognize me on a video (as she haven’t seen me for years) and she was in shock the moment I started talking (as she recognized my voice).”
Other Quora users say that they see right through the fake people who don’t really care about them outside of their looks:
“I understand that these people DON’T really care about me. I know they won’t be there to look the 50 year old me in the eye and tell me how beautiful my spirit, attitude, and courage is to them.”
Janelle Alicia Monroy writes in her Quora post:
“It feels like the world is a very superficial place, to an almost sad extent … I was a dorky band girl, with few friends, who would spend her free time at the library. Let’s just say my teenage years were not an attractive time for me. I still spend a lot of time at the library and maybe consider myself even dorkier, the only thing that has changed these past several years is how I look. Through this process I came to realize that people treat others drastically different depending on how they look. Sometimes just thinking about the stark contrasts of treatment makes me sad. I always hoped there was some deeper meaning to attraction and maybe even how friends would approach one another, but I found that to be untrue. Not to say that attraction based on personality doesn’t exist or that genuine love and friendship don’t exist, I’ve just realized to how much you have to look attractive just to be given a chance at some things.
After further explaining her new found attention Janelle concludes:
“With this being said, it hasn’t changed me and I don’t take these people seriously, because I understand that these people DON’T really care about me. I know they won’t be there to look the 50 year old me in the eye and tell me how beautiful my spirit, attitude, and courage is to them.”
Check out the full Quora thread for hundreds of more responses from users who share similar experiences.
