My Breakup With Botox

This one is personal.

I grew up in an era where women were in a constant, quiet war with getting older. Nobody questioned it. Youth was beauty. Beauty was worth. And that was just the water we all swam in.

In my early forties I tried Botox for the first time. And then a handful of times after that. Each time convincing myself it was fine. Each time something in me feeling slightly off.

But it wasn't until I started asking the harder question that everything shifted.

I had spent years doing the deep work of loving every version of myself. Elementary school Jessica. Teenage Jessica. The Jessica of her twenties and thirties. I had loved them all.

And then I realized — the one version I was withholding that love from was the one I hadn't met yet. The one with lines on her face. The one I was quietly bracing for. The one I was spending money to delay.

This episode is about what it actually means to love yourself unconditionally — and what it looks like when you find the place where you quietly aren't. It's not about Botox. It's about the question underneath it. And what I found when I finally stopped looking away.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Let's fix it. You can have a life that looks successful and still feel like you're caring way too much. The pressure, the overthinking, the constant weight of holding it all together. This is Live Lighter. I'm Jessica Berg, and this show is for women who are done living like that. Each week we'll be breaking down what's actually keeping you stuck in that pressure and how to start letting it go so that your life doesn't just look good, it actually feels good. Hello and welcome back to the Live Lighter Podcast. I am your host, Jessica Berg, and today we are going somewhere personal. In fact, all my episodes are going to have a layer of personal to them. So this is not unlike any other. However, this is one that I'm not really sure how this one's going to be received, and I don't really care about that. It's just something that I want to talk about because I do feel it's important. It's been important to me, and I want to share my experience and where I'm at with it. And it is about my breakup with Botox. And I just want to say before we get into it, if you've heard that little title and thought, oh God, this is gonna be a beauty episode, stay with me. Or maybe you just immediately started judging me right away. Like, oh my god, she did Botox. Ugh. That's okay. I'm okay for all of that. It's not a beauty episode. And if you start to feel that twinge of judgment, just stay with me. All right. This whole episode is about something way deeper than all of this. It's about the story I've been telling myself, the story a lot of us have been telling ourselves. It's this underlying fear or resistance to aging. And that's where I want to go with today. So if you're ready, let's get into it. Now I'm gonna tell my story, and it's not to say that everyone has this experience, but this is my podcast. So I'm gonna talk about my stories in the hopes that it might land for some of you. It might resonate for some of you. So I grew up, I was born in 1982. I am an 80s baby, and late 80s was right around the time that women, people, started to realize that Botox could be used to ward off wrinkles. And for me, the women I grew up around, there was this quiet resistance that they had to aging. And there were some, you know, things that they would say out loud about getting older and the grief and remorse and how awful it was to get, oh my god, I'm so old. But underneath that was this quiet fear that with aging, with the wrinkles, with the shifting of the bodies, the sagging, that they would become less relevant, less desired, less seen. So this is the culture and conditioning that I grew up in. And I don't feel that I'm alone in that. In fact, I feel that that is what culture pushes down on us. If you look at the beauty aisle of any target or God, there's a whole beauty stores that are dedicated to women reducing the signs of aging, to women finding ways to make themselves look more aesthetically beautiful. All the different makeups, all the different hair color, all the different creams and potions and lotions that are out there. I mean, it's a billion-dollar industry for a reason. It's tapping into this insecurity and this conditioning and this learning that we have in our society and our culture that we put on women. I mean, I can remember 12 years old. I was in seventh grade. I remember my grandmother was visiting. She's a beautiful woman and aged very gracefully. And I, but I do remember her teaching me at 12 how to put face lotion on. And I remember her showing me how to put it on my neck and her saying, remember to always go up because gravity is gonna pull it down. So we want to do the opposite. We want to pull it up. And so, even at that young age, it was instilled in me very innocently that aging is bad, and that we want to maintain our youth and anti-wrinkles for as long as possible. So it can start quietly, and that's what it is. It's this quiet conditioning that we as women absorb even from our younger ages, especially at younger ages. That it's just a little thing, it's totally normal. Everyone's doing it. It's fine, don't make it a big deal. Those 11s are gonna go away. And it did work, right? I did start to see the wrinkles go away. And I did it a handful of times over the following year and a half, and every single time I would convince myself that it was fine. Even though there was a little bit of this undercurrent that I wasn't being true to myself. I felt it every single time. Like something in me knew, something felt slightly off. And not about the Botox itself, even, but about the why behind it. Like I was making a choice from fear rather than from freedom. I was making a choice from insecurity rather than standing in my power to cling on to my youth just a little bit more. That was the quiet murmuring that was happening underneath. And it was this slow build, this accumulation, because the deeper I've gone into this work on myself, into my own healing, into women's empowerment, into really understanding the layers of conditioning that live in us that we get to unlearn to become more of who we are, the harder it became to keep looking away from the question underneath all of it. What am I actually doing here and why am I doing it? Why am I signing up to inject these toxins into my face so that I don't have these lines appear? And I have spent years, genuinely years, exploring the depth of love I have for myself, like all the versions of me. Elementary school Jessica, God, she was just this free little spirit that was just trying to be herself but also fit in. Teenage Jessica, a bit reckless. Jessica in her 20s, maybe even more reckless, 30s. I've done the work of sitting with all of those versions and loving them, like really, really loving them unconditionally and holding them. And so there is this immense amount of self-love that I have accumulated over these years. And still I was forced to ask myself, wait, if if I have all this love for myself, why am I raising my hand to go walk into this facility and say, I want to look a certain way? And I am vulnerably sharing this with you because I believe it's important for people to see that the healing journey has layers. It is genuinely layer after layer after layer. And it's it's beautiful, it's lifelong. And with each layer that gets released, we get to connect more deeply to our own love for ourselves, not the surface kind, the real kind, the kind that doesn't need everything to look a certain way to stay intact. So as I'm standing here with this deep love for myself, and it just wasn't matching to some of the actions that I was doing. Why was I doing this to myself if I love myself so deeply? And I had to ask myself, well, okay, what about this version of me? What about the version of me that's 50 and has more lines on her face? The one who's getting older, the one whose face is changing. Am I willing to love her the same way? Or am I going to keep outsourcing my own acceptance? And when I really sat with that, when I saw that I was loving all the past versions of me, which that in and of itself is a healing process and it's so beautiful, and I was loving who I am today, standing in my power. Yet, was I loving the aging Jessica, the one who was getting lines on her face that didn't look a certain way? Was I gonna love her the same way and see her just as powerful and beautiful? So that's the question that really sat with me and that drove me to ultimately say, fuck that. Fuck that. I love all of me. I love getting older. I love the wisdom that I gain with each passing year. So I want to talk, go back a little bit to talk about the conditioning, right? Where this actually all comes from, because it doesn't come from nowhere. We are taught from a really, really young age, and I mean through advertising, through the way women around us talk about themselves, through what gets celebrated and what just quietly gets dismissed, that a woman's value is tied to her youth, that beauty means young, that relevance fades, and that there's this clock running, and when it runs out, you become somehow less. And that is not something that I believe at all, but it is something that past generations of women that I grew up around did. And because I was around it so much, it starts to feel like truth. It just feels the way that things are because it has been so completely normalized, so deeply woven into how we talk about women, how women talk about themselves, that most of us, we just we absorb it without ever being asked if we actually agree with it. And I am seeing the more I'm opening my eyes to this, I am seeing pockets of this, this remembrance that's happening. I was just on a retreat in the Dominican Republic and it was so powerful. Women between the ages of 43 to 75 just standing in their power. And I remember a few years ago stumbling upon Julia Lewis Dreyfus's podcast that she started, wiser than me. And the whole premise of that podcast was to raise the awareness that older women are this completely untapped resource that we are not paying attention to. And she started that podcast to change that. That as women get older, there's such deep wisdom there that we need to amplify their voices. And honestly, that's not a new idea. If you go far enough back in a lot of ancient cultures and indigenous traditions and communities that weren't shaped by modern beauty industry, the elder woman was the one with the power. She was the keeper of wisdom. She was who the community turned to. Her age wasn't something to apologize for or to hide, it was the whole point. And somewhere we flipped that. We told women that their power lived in their youth, which means they were always, always on the losing side of time. And the more I have come to open my eyes and understand the system that keeps women in this constant loop of self-improvement, self-monitoring, self-doubt, the more clearly I freaking see this. And I just want to name it directly. The anxiety that can drive us toward things like Botox, the fear of becoming invisible, the quiet terror that our worth might be fading along with the smoothness of our skin. That didn't come from us. It was cultivated. It was incredibly profitable. And it has been very, very effective at keeping women's energy turned inward and downward rather than outward. And when a woman is at war with her own face, with her own body, she has less energy for everything else, for her voice, for her power, for the kind of deep self-trust that just doesn't need constant external confirmation. It is a conditioning. It is a leakage of power. So the question I had to sit with, and the one I want to offer to you, was this What level of acceptance am I withholding myself if my appearance doesn't look a certain way or shifts a certain way? Because if I genuinely, genuinely love myself, which I so do, across all the versions, all the chapters, then what does it mean that I'm afraid of the face that's coming? What conditions am I quietly placing on my own worth? And I started to see it differently when I asked myself this. I started to see it as an opportunity rather than a judgment, an opportunity to go even deeper with the love I have for myself, to extend that to the version of me that is still becoming. The one with more years behind her, more layers, more life. And yeah, more lines that are basically just the story of all of it written on my face. And when I embraced that, when I really, really held that close to my heart, that felt like freedom to me. That felt like empowerment, this deep-rooted self-love. And I want to be really honest about something before we close. I am sharing this knowing there may be judgment, like I said at the start of this episode. And I just want to say that that's okay. I am not here to absorb the wounds that other people carry around this stuff. We all have them. This topic touches something tender in a lot of people. And I also want to be really clear that if you get Botox and you love it and it feels completely right for you, this is not me telling you that you are wrong. It is your body, it is your choice, full stop. That is not what this episode is. This episode is my story, my reckoning, and the question I got to ask myself, and I got to take action on the other side of that question. Because the truth is that I grew up in the same world many of you did, and I absorbed the same messages many of you did. I made choices from fear that I later had to look at honestly. And I'm still doing that in so many different areas of my life. And I will continue to do that as I evolve, as I grow, as I transform. I'm not standing here as someone who has it all figured out. I am standing here as someone who is actively, imperfectly, and continuously doing the work on myself. That's it. That's the whole thing. And sometimes doing the work means looking at something you've been telling yourself is fine and going, is it though? Is it actually fine? Or is there something underneath all of this that's worth getting a little curious about? So as we close out today, I want to leave you with one thing to sit with. And that is where are you giving yourself conditional love? Maybe it's not aging. Maybe it's more your weight or your achievements or your relationship status, whatever it might be, where are you loving yourself conditionally? And where can you start to shift that? Where can you start to love yourself more fully and more freely? So thank you so much for being here today. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. And until next time, be well. All right, so that's today's podcast. Thank you for listening. If you would like to learn more about the services that I provide to women, you can check out my website at Jessberg Coaching.com. That's J E S S B E R G C O A C H I N G dot com. Until next time, be well.