Totally, Definitely Suffering from Success
I’m ready to live my Hot Girl Semester.
It is time to level up on the bad bitch scale and become the main character. Join me on my quest to become a better human through following questionable self-help advice off the internet!
In this week’s episode of desperate self-improvement, I’ll be utilising the ancient wisdom of WikiHow. It’s an educational one-stop-shop that can teach you how to change a lightbulb and how to admit to having a foot fetish. However, the latter seems to be more of an act of self-degradation than self-improvement…
Everyone knows that the No #1 criteria for being a bad bitch is a bangin’ personality. As great as being hot is, you can’t be the artsy heartbreaker protagonist of an indie coming-of-age film with the personality of a stale cracker. If there’s nothing going on upstairs, how are you supposed to speak in poetry and curbstomp the patriarchy at the same time? Luckily, WikiHow’s godsend “4 Ways to Develop Personality” tutorial has got me covered. While I’d like to think I’m a mildly interesting person to be around, I’m bored of current me. There’s only so much fun you can have being yourself. Life’s too short not to ~spice~ things up!
While I’d like to think I’m a mildly interesting person to be around, I’m bored of current me. There’s only so much fun you can have being yourself. Life’s too short not to ~spice~ things up!
According to WikiHow, the first step of developing a personality is “evaluating yourself”. I began by opening up to a random page in my journal, scribbling a shitty pros and cons list with accompanying ambiguous doodles. As much as I’d like to change everything, sadly personality development is not a game of Sims or a Build-A-Bear factory where you can start from scratch if you’re not happy with the prototype. However, with some deep self-reflection and contemplation, I formulated a clear picture of what it would look like being “that girl”.
After the self-evaluation, I was ready to move onto the second step of “focusing on positive personality traits”. In a nutshell, the tutorial encourages us to work on cultivating positive qualities like confidence, reliability and agreeability. Damn, I guess I’ll have to stop threatening to throw hands at anyone who slightly inconveniences me and maybe start replying to messages without a 3-5 business day delay. As for the confidence part, WikiHow references maintaining “good eye contact” and “smiling” as ways of displaying confident body language. Noted! I decided to test this out at work by grinning from ear to ear for as long as my facial muscles allowed throughout the shift. Long story short, my co-workers were creeped out and concerned as to why I wasn’t in my usual state of misery and despair.
The next step was, you guessed it, “avoiding negative personality traits”, AKA exercising control over “undesirable” qualities like anger, greed and doubt. Even though most of the time I’m super Type B, there’s nothing like Auckland Transport that triggers my fight-or-flight mode. Their unreliable services make me literally take flight in an attempt to catch buses that hurtle past three minutes early and square up with the app developers when services are cancelled without notification. However, we gotta be the main character and follow WikiHow’s invaluable recommendation to “take long and deep breaths” and “imagine yourself in a calm and relaxed place”. Weirdly enough, aggressively huffing and puffing at the bus stop gained me some weird looks from the local gold-card-holding grandmas. It’s okay, I think I managed to breathe out all my anger as soon as I started picturing myself zooming along in a Tesla gifted and built by Elon Musk himself. It turns out imagining my life as a sugar baby was oddly calming—maybe those green-juice-drinking yogis were onto something with meditation!
It turns out imagining my life as a sugar baby was oddly calming—maybe those green-juice-drinking yogis were onto something with meditation!
Even though I was happy meditating life away, it would be criminal not to complete the last step of this extremely inspiring guide: “believing in yourself”. It was recommended as part of this to continuously remind yourself of your uniqueness which I did by reciting Jughead’s “I’m a Weirdo” monologue in front of the mirror continuously while sporting a quirky beanie. As per usual, it did the trick and I was left feeling extra not like other girls! To wrap up this highly informative guide, WikiHow concluded with the simple suggestion of “finding your inner happiness”. You’ve got to give it to WikiHow for giving instructions with the same energy as a “live laugh love” mug: the most inspiring quote ever written. Who would’ve thought simply being happy was the cure-all to my chronic existential dread and imposter syndrome? We must gate-keep this ground-breaking advice at all costs!
I feel forever indebted to WikiHow for providing extremely innovative tips for personality development. After following this guide, I am a new and enlightened woman with the personality of a fresh cracker—a notable improvement if you ask me. Let’s kick off Hot Girl Semester!