The Final Stage of the Divorce Glow-Up (I'm Living It Now)

In March 2020 the world shut down, and I have a confession about that time: I secretly thrived.

I was in Bali when it happened. I'd spent the years before discovering digital nomad towns, collecting stamps, collecting courses, collecting versions of myself. Then everyone got sent home, the planes stopped, and while the whole world grieved its routines, I felt something I didn't dare say out loud. Relief. Aliveness, even. Everyone was stuck at home. So was I. And I was quietly having one of the best periods of my life.

It took me years to understand why. To explain it, I have to tell you about the stages, because I lived all three.

Stage 1: The glow-up that was really an audition

After my divorce, I threw myself into becoming better. Self-development books, courses, retreats, 47 countries. From the outside it looked like freedom, and parts of it truly were. I don't regret a single stamp in that passport.

But underneath all that improving sat a sentence I couldn't see yet, and it was running my entire life:

I need to be perfect to deserve love.

That was my biggest narrative after the divorce. I thought if I just kept improving myself, I would be chosen again. Every course was evidence. Every country was a credential. I wasn't growing for me. I was building a case.

If you'd asked me back then, I would have told you I was healing. I believed it completely. That's the thing about this stage: you're not faking anything. You're doing real work with real effort. You're just doing it for a judge who doesn't exist.

Stage 2: The pandemic took away my audience

Then Covid removed the one thing my glow-up secretly depended on: somewhere to perform it.

No new countries. No new rooms to walk into as the improved version of me. Just me, at home, with myself. And instead of falling apart, I came alive, because for the first time in years, the improving stopped and something else got space.

During those years I created an online video podcast called Unconventional Asians. I interviewed life coaches and therapists, and I did something that still feels brave when I think about it: I had them coach me live, on camera. My breakdowns to breakthroughs, in front of anyone who watched.

Somewhere in those sessions it landed. Healing is not just getting better. It's about accepting myself. Flaws and all. The whole audition had been backwards: I wasn't unloved because I was imperfect. I was exhausted because I'd made love conditional on a finish line that kept moving.

Who I am is enough. I know how that sentence reads on a coffee mug. Living it is another thing entirely, and it sent me down the healing rabbit hole for years. Somatic work, inner child work, all of it. This was the part of the glow-up nobody was posting: no before-and-after photo, nothing to show at the end of a day of it. Just a woman slowly dropping a case she'd been building since the divorce.

Stage 3: Back to Bali, allergic to the healing scene

A year ago, I started my nomadic journey in Bali, thinking that it would be the perfect launchpad with people who’d get me. And I noticed something that confused me at first: I was no longer attracted to any of it. The healing modalities, the ceremonies, the seekers arriving by the planeload to find themselves. I'd sit across from another pretentious healer and roll my eyes on the inside, while keeping my practiced flight attendant smile.

For a moment I wondered if I'd gone backwards.

Then I understood: that's what integration feels like. You stop putting healing on a pedestal when it moves into your everyday life. It stops being retreats and vocabulary and becomes something simple: how you talk to yourself when you make a mistake, what you do when the old narrative knocks. I stopped needing healing to be my identity because it had finally become my baseline.

Here’s where the irony lies. I went back to working on looking my best. The facials, the nails, dressing beautifully, moving my body, setting goals, growing again. From the outside, stage three looks almost identical to stage one.

The difference is invisible, and it's everything. Stage one improved so someone would choose me. Stage three grows because I already felt at peace with myself.

The stage most of us get stuck in

Here's the pattern I see constantly now, and I say this as someone who lived on one side of it: most women after divorce pick one stage and camp there.

Some stay in stage one for years, glowing on the outside, running on the same old sentence underneath, certain the next improvement will finally make them feel chosen. Some find the healing and never leave it, retreat after retreat, always processing, a little suspicious of anyone who seems to be simply living. And some are in denial that either room exists.

I couldn't see my own stage while I was in it. That's not a character flaw, it's how narratives work: the sentence running your life is the one you can't hear. Mine took a global shutdown to surface.

You probably don't need a pandemic. Sometimes you just need someone to name the stages so you can find yourself on the map.

And it's worth knowing what stage three actually feels like from the inside, you book the facial and enjoy the whole thing instead of auditing whether you've earned it. You set a goal and notice nobody's watching, and you want it anyway. You get dressed beautifully for a day with no plans. The improving continues. The audition is over.

If you want help seeing where you are, take the Glow-Up Quiz. It meets you where you feel it the most right now: your identity, your body, or your money.

The final stage of the divorce glow-up is to work on looking your best again.

Now you know why I won't need to explain any further.