I have loved London my whole life. The life, the chances, and the steady hum of a city that never really sleeps. But a few years ago, that beautiful scenery felt like a mirror that showed me all my flaws. Like a lot of things these days, it began on my phone. According to https://cityofeve.org.

As someone in London looking for love, I spent a lot of time on social media. I thought the girls in my feed were real because they had perfect skin, hair, and bodies that did not seem to follow the laws of physics. They were always on vacation somewhere unbelievably fancy, or they were just looking stunning while getting a flat white in Shoreditch. I was a little ignorant at the time, but I really thought that this was the standard. that this was what London’s dating scene called for.

My own image was not good enough. The girl I saw in the mirror was just like everyone else. Yeah, that person had a nice smile, but they also had pores, an uneven gut, and bad hair days most of the time. It made me feel plain and even unnoticeable when I looked at the digital versions of perfection I saw every day. No matter how much makeup I put on or how hard I tried to take the perfect selfie, the gap between my real life and their carefully built fantasy felt too big to bridge.

This feeling that I was “not good enough” spread to every part of my life. Friends, a great group of women I met while working in the city, tried to stop me. When they saw me looking through my feed, they would say, “You know that is not real, right?” Good lighting and filters are all it takes. I would nod and act like I got it, but what they said did not really hit me. What I saw was too strong. They had become a part of my mind and made me believe that my face and body were truly broken.

Going out for a night in Soho or a drink in a pub near Waterloo would make me feel like I was just a small part of someone else’s beautiful life. While my friends laughed and had a good time, I would look at my phone and compare myself to the most recent filtered picture. I was actually going on dates. People were paying attention to me. They were just making up voices in my head that told me it was not true because the guys had not seen my “flaws” yet. I was sure that they would go away once they did.

This negative attitude is not just about being sad; it is a huge lie about what it means to be human, and especially about what it means to be a woman trying to figure out the complicated world of love and relationships. It hurts your confidence and makes you think that physical beauty is the only way to connect with someone and that any other kind of relationship is a compromise. This false reality had me so caught up that I missed the beauty in my own life and the real relationships I was already making. The casual relationships I had, the laughs I shared with friends, and the times I spent with them in busy London coffee shops—everything else seemed less important than my single, obsessive goal of looking like someone who did not exist. This obsession became the main thing I did when I went on dates: not to find someone who liked me for who I was, but to become the most perfect version of myself so that I would finally be “worthy” of love and attention. I was not aware of it at the time, but I was basing my whole sense of self-worth on a defective structure.