Glow Up vs Personal Growth: Why Becoming Is Painful (and Worth It!)

Shortly before I turned 18, when I was fresh out of high school and newly obsessed with the WWE, I decided to sculpt my physique into that of a female wrestler — or at least as close to it as I could manage. My thought process was simple: get the body first, and confidence and charisma would naturally follow. So one random morning, I pulled on an old t-shirt, a loose pair of trousers, and set off to become a fitness goddess.

Long story short? My ambition died young.

Fast forward a couple of years to a little bit after my 21st birthday. This time, I’d made the bold decision to change my life by changing my hair. Thus, I set off to town, straight into the priciest salon I could find (which, full disclosure, wasn’t that pricey), and basked in the ambience of their well-ventilated glamour and complimentary coffee. About three hours later, I walked out of the place feeling fabulous, transformed, on the precipice of greatness…

… only to discover, roughly one week later, that I was still the same old me. Back at square one, feeling as listless as ever.

Where had I gone wrong?

Glow-Up vs Personal Growth: What’s the Difference?

In retrospect, I wasn’t chasing personal growth, I was chasing a glow-up, and those two things are not the same.

At the time, I was hungry for change, eager to polish all the parts of myself that I didn’t like, and always on the lookout for a fresh start or reinvention. But here’s what cosy film montages and boss-babe Pinterest quotes often fail to say: that the warm, glowy feeling that sets in after taking that first step towards change? It doesn’t last. And chasing after it can become an addictive but ultimately fruitless pursuit.

That’s the core of the glow-up vs grow-up debate, between transient change and deep transformation:

• One sparkles, the other strips.
• One is surface, the other is deep.
• One feels like a dream, the other hits a little bit too close to reality.
• One changes your life for a moment. The other transforms you for a lifetime.

While a glow-up often focuses on the high that comes with making an aesthetic change, real personal growth is painful as it demands a major reckoning with your inner identity. It forces you to come to terms with what you thought life would look like before you knew any better. And after that, to choose intentionally, sometimes painfully, to recalibrate.

This is not to say that starting small or chasing a little sparkle is wrong. In fact, small tweaks like adding movement to your day, decluttering your space, or refreshing your wardrobe can help shake you out of a stagnant, stuck place. But those acts alone won’t get you unstuck for long. To do that, you need to add grit and resilience to the mix.

The Grief That Comes with Growth

To summarise the above, a little glow-up at the onset of change is really just a small piece of the puzzle that is turning your life around. But when you start to move — really move — something deeper begins to stir within. You find yourself bumping up against old narratives, unacknowledged disappointments, and regrets that you didn’t know you were carrying.

It’s a bit of a grieving process, one that we all go through at some point or other. We’ve all mourned quiet losses such as:

• The ‘dream’ job that turned toxic.
• The marriage-to-children timeline that never materialised.
• The friendships that withered without closure.
• The passports that remain unstamped.
• The time that was wasted on hopeless pursuits.
• The political beliefs that we set aside.
• The version of ourselves that we always swore we’d become.

Once we acknowledge these losses for what they are, we’ve hit the inflection point where the initial joy and triumph of a glow-up turn into dismay, discomfort, and ultimately, growth.

From Glow-Up to Growth: What Are You Grieving?

To finish off: What version of your life, or of yourself, do you need to release in order to move from glow-up to true personal growth?

Name it.

Mourn it.

Then let it go.

Because becoming is not about the glow-up. It’s about the grow-up, and the woman that will emerge on the other side of that grief.

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Feature image credit: Elliot Ogbeiwi

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