- Let's see...
Do you think this looks all right?
- Yeah, I think it looks cute.
[beard trimmer buzzes] [censor beep]
[groovy music]
- I haven't posted anything in a long time,
largely because of issues I'm having with my mental health.
And one mental health issue I've discovered recently is that I may or may not have body dysmorphia.
Molly, what is body dysmorphia?
- For me, personally, whenever I look in a mirror, I'm like, 'who is that?'
I have no sense of self; if I don't see a picture of myself or see myself in the mirror for long enough,
I can't remember what I look like.
If I look too long in a mirror, I freak out because I zero in on every single flaw I have
and everything that I think looks horribly ugly, so
I don't look at myself naked because I don't like seeing the veins and scars and hair.
- With me specifically, I wear a hat basically all of the time.
I have this obsession with my hair being... I don't wanna say 'perfect'
because sometimes it doesn't even look good, but I have to sit and make sure
every single strand of my hair looks this specific way that I want it to look,
and I have to-- it's like I'm sculpting my hair, and it's ridiculous.
It's gotten to the point where I've started cutting my own hair with scissors,
like if something is slightly out of place, I'll snip it off.
And now my hair is kind of ruined because I've cut it into huge patches.
- I can remember this has been happening for a long time, because your hair was always
pristine in high school. I can remember you getting really upset if somebody came and
ruffled your hair, if somebody tried to play with it, because it would mess it up
and you had spent a really long time working on it.
- Today we'll be resolving that problem by getting rid of all my hair.
[beard trimmer buzzes] [chuckling]
[slide machine click] [upbeat music]
- Okay. - This is what we're working with.
My boyfriend has very politely let me steal his beard trimmer.
- Ahh!
- This is your cloak now. I'm a professional.
Shall we begin? - Sure. [buzzing begins]
- Let's give you a reverse mohawk to start with.
- My tiny hairs are in my nose.
- Right now you kind of have an old man mullet.
- One of my fears is that I secretly have a misshapen head.
- Your head looks perfectly shapen to me. - Okay. I don't look like an egg?
- No. How does this feel?
- It doesn't feel like much. - How about emotionally?
- I mean, I felt kind of nervous, but now it's just whatever.
- There's so much hair. - I'm sorry. I have so much.
I might need to shower. - Yeah, you sure will.
- Hey! This is my chair! She took my chair!
Not for babies. - Not for stinky.
[slide machine click]
- I'm back-- from my shower. [laughter]
Why don't we just take these off my head?
And now we're on to phase two... which is... - Nice and fuzzy.
- the makeover. - I'm gonna do the makeup guru thing.
- This is what I use to cover my zits. Molly and I made a video
last year, where we put makeup on each other and talked about...
mental health. So we decided to do a sequel.
I haven't been diagnosed with dysmorphia, although I did mention it to my therapist this week.
I've been doing a lot of research because I've been pursuing a specific diagnosis
that I'm not gonna really get into until I have the diagnosis.
I've been reading a lot on symptoms of a lot of different mental health issues.
It seems that my obsession with my hair and my compulsion to cut it is not neurotypical.
- I also have problems, so we've bonded over these problems for many years now.
- How does your dysmorphia intersect with your gender dysphoria?
- My gender dysphoria has actually been getting better.
I had a weird period of time where I didn't really know much about being trans
or being non-binary. I didn't really know I had options.
And when I first started college, one of the first friends that I made was a trans girl.
And she turned out to be the worst person in the world, so thanks Jay!
She didn't really believe in non-binary being a thing,
and she believed that if you're trans, you're either a trans guy or a trans girl.
When I started questioning my own identity, which I have been since I was like...
freshman or sophomore year of high school?
When I started questioning, she was like, 'Oh. Oh, you're a trans guy.'
'We're gonna get you a binder, and you're gonna keep your hair short, and don't wear makeup,
and your name is Daniel now, and you're gonna use he/him pronouns.'
And she basically just threw me into this, and for a while, I was like,
'Okay, I mean I don't feel like a girl, so maybe she's right. Maybe I'm Daniel.'
- And this is why in a lot of my videos in the past year and a half
we've been calling Molly 'Danny' and variations thereof.
- Shit went very badly with Jay, and shortly after she got expelled,
I started realizing that I wasn't Danny and that I wasn't a guy and that it didn't really fit,
so it took me a lot of time to get used to the fact that yeah, this is my body.
I have it.
And I can't do anything about it, and I realized that I don't really need or want
any kind of corrective surgery, and I'm pretty happy with where I'm at, gender-wise.
- I've recently come out as non-binary, which I haven't made a dedicated video about because
YouTube comments are a cancerous hellscape that I haven't wanted to deal with. - True.
- I've always been a tomboy, and part of that is my sensory processing issues,
where I don't wear makeup--not because... I don't like makeup, but it's not because I don't like makeup,
it's because I don't like how it feels on my face--
I love my hair short because it doesn't touch my forehead, like I cannot handle my hair
touching my forehead, so I always have it short now.
I wear loose clothing that hides my form.
Part of it is because I don't like the texture of clothing--
that texture, speaking of textures, is Bad.
- Lemme switch it up to this brush then. - Okay, thank you.
A lot of my body-related mental health issues also overlap with my gender identity
and how that's evolved over the years. I feel like some people will misconstrue that
as like, 'oh well, your gender identity is a mental illness' or whatever,
but just because there's an overlap in those two things doesn't mean they're caused by each other,
because there are lots of people who are neurotypical--
people who don't have sensory issues or anything like that--who are trans, y'know?
- Linking my dysphoria to my dysmorphia, as my dysphoria went down,
my dysmorphia went up, because I always had these problems with my body,
but I would always think, 'oh, I hate my body because it's not the way I want it to be,'
because when I thought that I was a trans guy, I was like, 'oh, I hate my body because of my genitals
or because of my chest, or because I look at my face and I'm like, wow that's not a boy, I hate that.'
And since I've come to terms with being non-binary, I look in the mirror and I'm like, 'oh, I still hate my face,
I guess it's just because it sucks.'
I still hate my body, I guess I'm ugly!
Most of the time it's okay, I can just accept like, 'yep, that's my meat suit.'
Recently it's gotten kinda bad.
It got to a point where I went and I looked in the mirror for a little too long,
and then I started crying and did not stop crying until Michael put a weighted blanket on me
and got me McDonald's.
- I've been seeing a lot of discourse about how we need to move past makeup being
'oh, it's my art form,' and into 'this is actually a very harmful industry and just calling it art
is not at all acknowledging the industry that's built on making people insecure about themselves.'
- Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. - Yeah, and like,
that's always been my point of view because I've basically never worn makeup,
and I was kind of a social outcast growing up. I didn't really get social norms,
and makeup was a social norm at the time that I didn't follow, so I've always been aware,
but it just seems like it's coming into more popular consciousness, and it makes me really excited
to see more people choosing not to wear makeup. - Yeah, absolutely.
So you're looking for a purple cut crease with gold glitter.
- I don't know what that means, but sure.
- There's a lot of thorough blending going on.
- Do you have any advice for people who are insecure about their body?
- What I've been trying to do about my body insecurities is detach myself from
what society thinks my body's supposed to look like, so...
I know that objectively, I have a body that a lot of people have told me,
'oh, I wish I looked like you, you're so skinny, you're so small, you're so petite.'
But I have my own insecurities, and I have to remember that everyone else has their own insecurities too.
I try to compare it to, say, a drawing, a piece of art.
Whenever I draw, I go, 'oh, I need to shade that more, I need to fix that,
that eye isn't very even, I need to do this, I need to do that...'
When I'm looking at it, I'm seeing what I wish it could be.
And then somebody else walks in and looks at my drawing, and they're like, 'wow that's really good,'
because they're not looking at what they wish it could be, and they're not looking at
what they think should be better, they're looking at what it is.
So when I look at myself in the mirror, I see pimples, or I see the chip in my tooth, or I see dark circles,
and then I realize, when I look at somebody else I never think about these things.
Every part of my body is something necessary to keep me alive and thriving,
and I appreciate it. And I have to think of it like a machine instead of an actual body, I guess.
Look up. - [nervous 'ahhhh']
- Here, just keep on looking up, I'm not gonna get it in your eye.
[glamorous montage music plays]
- You look cute. Stop that. [laughter]
- Thank you for hanging out with me, Molly. - Absolutely.
- Thank you for shaving off all of my hair. We've had a great evening.
Let us know if you want us to discuss any other topics while putting makeup on each other, or something?
I don't know.
- That was cheesy.
- [in gross voice] I'm very pretty.
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