The Glow Up Tax

The Glow Up Tax

Gabby Turner decided in January that 2026 would be her glow up year — sustainable, patient goals around her skin, her curls, and her consistency at the gym, built to last past a single burst of motivation and gave herself until her 30th birthday to get there. She went in with a healthy mindset, real self-confidence, and no interest in extremes. Then a few months into hormonal acne treatment, her skin got worse instead of better, and she noticed something unexpected: instead of grace, her first instinct was instant self-criticism, to the point of avoiding a night out with friends because of how her face looked. This episode is Gabby naming what she's calling the glow up tax — the quiet cost that comes with pursuing any beauty standard, even from the most grounded, healthy place, and why noticing when that cost gets too high matters more than the goal itself. She gets into the messy middle of self-improvement, what it means to catch yourself reverting to old self-talk mid-glow-up, the tools she's using to interrupt that spiral including naming her inner critic "Greg," and why grounding confidence has to exist before the hard part hits, not just after.

Transcript

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Is the glow app actually helping you, or is it slowly sending you back to the insecure middle school version of yourself? Because here's the thing about self-improvement that no one's putting in the captions of their transformation content. You can go into this journey with the healthiest of mindsets, no extremes, no crash anything, and still end up in the messy middle that makes you like yourself less than when you even started. I decided in January of this year that this 2026 was going to be my glow up year. And because I wanted to do this the right way, I even gave myself to my 30th birthday next year to accomplish these vanity goals. And then a few months in, one specific moment made me realize that all this journey was going to do was threaten that healthy mindset. So that's the question. Is the pursuit of a glow-up actually helping? Or is it quietly costing you something you didn't budget for? I'm Gabby, and this is While I've Got You. So this year I wrote down a bunch of goals like I usually do following all these different categories. I did quizzes, I did tests, I did everything you can think of so I could really rock 2026. A couple of weeks into the year, I kind of scrapped all of that because I really felt called, I guess, into a different direction. I wanted this year to be a glow-up year. I really wanted my internal feelings, how I think of myself, how I think I present to the world, to be an accurate reflection on like how I actually present to the world, to reality, if that makes sense. So I wanted to focus things on things like getting braces, which I have, don't look, um, working on my curls, growing my hair out, working on my skincare, um, being consistent at the gym, drinking more water, eating balanced meals, that kind of stuff. I knew going into this that I likely wasn't going to start 2026 a certain way and end 2026, having accomplished all of my dreams and my goals, because I am just a human being and my consistency doesn't always look real consistent. Sometimes I fall off, sometimes I get back up again, you know, and start singing gospel songs. We fall down and we get back up on track for our New Year's resolutions around here. So I decided to extend a little bit further past the end of the year and knowing that this would take time, that it wasn't gonna be overnight. I really wanted to go into this glow-up year, these New Year's resolutions, with a mindset that this was going to take effort, and this was going to be me setting myself up with routines and systems that would last me hopefully the rest of my life, and not necessarily like grind really hard for the next 12 months and then pop out and show people. So I gave myself the arbitrary date of before my 30th birthday, which is next July. So not only did I acknowledge that this was gonna be a process, I knew that there were gonna be some bumps in the road, I was mentally prepared. And the things that I was doing, the things that I was trying to get set up were not crazy things. I wasn't all of a sudden going to start counting my calories every day. I didn't want to start going to the gym eight days a week. I didn't want to do those things. I really wanted to approach building out these systems in a healthy and sustainable way. So that brings me to this jump scare of a thought that popped into my head a couple months ago. I had some friends of a friend in town visiting and was invited to go out. Well, I was already overwhelmed trying to like manage life. I knew that I probably wasn't gonna be able to go out because I was just so overwhelmed with everything else going on in my life. When I was actually asked to come hang out, the first thought that popped into my head wasn't mama's tired. She cannot actually leave this home this week. It was my face is breaking out so badly right now that I know no amount of makeup, no amount of zhizg, no amount of liquid courage, no amount of new outfits, none of it was going to make me feel confident and feel good about myself being out in the world. And so I didn't want to leave my house. I have had some pretty low lows when it comes to the self-confidence department, and I can assure you I have never been so down bad that I am thinking about not leaving my home because I don't want people to see my face. This face. I don't want people to see this face. That's crazy. As you can probably tell, and if you've known me for longer than 30 seconds, I have worked extremely hard to be infatuated with who I am, how I look inside, outside, my personality, I'm smart, I'm cute, I'm funny, I'm wise, I'm really dedicated. Okay, okay, this is gonna go on for a long time. I'll stop. But I have worked so hard to get to a place where the things that society tell me are wrong about my body, about my hair, about my skin, about whatever are not things that I harp on. I am usually the loudest hype man for myself in every room I walk into. And that is hard-earned. That comes from years of faking it until I make it, and now I am net, like 99% really happy, really secure and really secure in myself, etc. So when I'm making this decision to quote unquote like optimize some things going into this new year, again, not making crazy vast changes. When I decided to optimize my health and have a skincare routine that's got some retinol in it, and when it things got hard and got messy, I didn't default back to this years-long buildup of myself. I immediately went to degrading myself and being like, I can go out like this, I can go to the world like this, and that's what I want to talk to you all about today. Like I mentioned, I love my body, it's banging. My skin is popping now. My curls, they are curling. I genuinely love 99.5% of the things about myself. I love all the things that I want to make like micro improvements or changes to, are things that at a baseline, I really enjoy. And still, when I was in that uncomfortable middle, very specifically when I was dealing with hormonal acne and I was three months into taking spiranolactone, and my acne was getting worse, and the like antibiotic ointment they gave me wasn't working. I wasn't of the thought, like, you came into this knowing your skin was gonna purge. You came into this knowing that you don't like going to the gym. You came in this knowing that you are stressed all the time and you shed a lot of hair because of it. You came into this knowing that you have nightmares and you don't sleep well. But when I was actually in the thick of it, I wanted to quit. Because in that messy middle, I disliked myself more than I had ever before. Before I even started this, I disliked myself so much in that moment. Now, I wanted to talk about this because I am mostly out of the weeds now. Your girl's on trend knowing, her skin's glowing. I'm going to the gym, I'm back being consistent. Um, I'm going more often. I'm working on getting my protein in. Blah. If anybody is trying to get their protein in right now, you know it's exhausting. You need 500 grams a day, and nothing's got everything's 12. Like it's it's infuriating. But, anyways, I'm out of the messy middle. Of course, I have my days, I have my hours, I have my minutes where I'm like, man, I really wish all this work I'm doing at the gym, my butt was popping. Really wish I had a fat ass right now. But I'm mostly out of the messy middle. And it's made me realize that when you're pursuing anything like vanity adjacent, whether you go into it with a positive mindset, whether you go into it very well grounded, when you go into pursuing anything vain, you have to pay a tax. It doesn't mean that anything's wrong with you for wanting to pursue the things that make you feel better and more confident in yourself, or that you shouldn't optimize, that you shouldn't go and try to tweak the little things that you're like, you know, I love my curly hair, but wouldn't it be so much cooler if I wasn't losing it because I'm not sleeping well because I'm stressed and I don't know how to manage my cortisol levels? Wouldn't that be cute and sick? It doesn't mean anything's wrong with you. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't pursue those things. It just means that there's a tax and you have to be ready to pay it. If you have ever pursued a beauty standard, and I'm assuming that's her body, even if you've gone into things feeling confident, feeling grounded, feeling like, okay, I've done the work. Now I'm doing this from a healthy place and a healthy mindset. Even if you've been officially marked safe from the extremist cultures of health and wellness and beauty, anyone who has gotten to a healthy and intentional place that you wanted to work on still fell into the trap of diminishing your self-worth while you're in that uncomfortable and weird middle, even if you expected it. This episode is for you and it's for me. I'm here to tell you you can still want the physical thing. Trust me, the world will happily drown you in its modifications and making you be more deemed acceptable, deemed more acceptable. But you have to notice when the tax you're paying for the best version yourself is above your tax bracket, is more than you can afford. And that really comes from recognizing, looking into yourself, being in tune with yourself and your body and your internal thoughts. I have named my internal negative monologue. The name is Greg. And so when Greg gets to talking, I stop myself and I say, That's enough, Greg. No one asked you. I think that it's so important that when we're going through these uncomfortable middles, I am still in the uncomfortable middle. I might not be feeling like I can't leave my house anymore, but I'm still having those days. We need to have a line in the sand that says, Ha, ah, it's a little bit too much. And now I need to take a step back and reevaluate and reassess what is the place that I can get to, the place that I can sacrifice, that I have worked to be able to shed and sacrifice, and what do I still need to hold on to and work through and process? This whole topic, I agree, feels like one long contradiction, or at the very least, a very fine line to walk through that I have not fully resolved myself. I have recognized that there is a breaking point of mine in this process, and there is a place that, in the pursuit of better and the pursuit of vanity, and the things that I think are going to bring my internal expression outward into reality are gonna cost me something. It's gonna cost me shedding the place that I've been, the person that I've been. And if I'm not ready, I will revert all the way back. Way back. I will be me in sixth grade talking negatively to myself about my body, about my skin, and not wanting to leave my house for that reason. It doesn't necessarily matter which comes first, but you either need the tools to interrupt the I hate myself spiral, or you need to have built the confidence beforehand. When I say the tools, I mean like telling Greg to shut up or being in therapy, etc. Or you need to have built the confidence beforehand so when those negative thoughts start happening, you can stop and say, wait a second, that don't even sound like me. I'm cute, I'm real cute. Either way, you need something that is grounding you, and that grounding has to exist before the messy middle. Now, before I let you go, I want to say thank ya so much for sitting in this with me. If you are in the messy middle right now, I hope that you feel a little less alone and a little more prepared for tax season. If you're interested in hearing more conversations like this, you can follow the podcast on all platforms at While I've Got You. And if you're catching us on YouTube, this is my first video in 4K. And I've been working on this for a really long time. It's been very hard. So if you get the chance, please make sure that you like and subscribe. Until next time, this has been While I've Got You