There’s nothing wrong with feeling bad about the way you look. You can’t be blamed for the ways you tend to perceive yourself. Although the obvious thing to say is “there is no such thing as looking like a girl”, it’s obvious from the context that you mean you’re worrying about your looks not meeting most cultural expectations of what a woman is and/or generally not passing as a woman. Not that it’s any consolation, but plenty of cis people are in the same camp there… there’s not much some rando like me could say that could make you feel better, but it’s always good to think that now is better than before, and the future will be better than now.

Hopelessness is the worst feeling, and I remember frequently just reading and writing and thinking on and on, all in hopes that eventually I’d stumble upon something that solved my problems and suddenly get the drive to completely turn around my life. But that wasn’t how it worked. It’s a tempting and addicting path to spend all your time and effort boiling alive in your own stresses, and it’s hard to push yourself away from harmful coping mechanisms since they can be ways to get stress off your chest temporarily, and they can introduce a low-level comfort in the short term. Even though you’re still feeling anxious the entire time and it just makes it worse in the long-run. To me it feels like when I drink tons of caffeine…

The only way I was able to eventually mostly detach myself from my stress-cycle was by cutting myself off from the mechanisms I used to dump stress on (including Reddit and Discord, and other social media/forums/boards/comment sections), to keep attempting to rationalize that the gods can take my executive functioning but they can’t take my ability to obsessively write cursive variants of foreign scripts (I mean to say that I have at least a little control as long as I tell myself I do), and most importantly trying to accept that nothing will happen when I want it to happen (or even near when I want it to happen) and that the betterment I hope for, while they’ll come eventually, aren’t coming now or even in a week from now or even a month or year from now. And that I will not have any radical sudden change in my life whatsoever.

Saying “just stop feeling the way you feel lol” isn’t very insightful, but my gist is that sometimes your goal should be to avoid focusing on the grandiose illusions of what you want for yourself, to avoid having big dreams and big expectations, and to avoid feeling that you need to constantly be changing or improving or doing something with your time/life. There are no deadlines. You just started young adulthood, you have like 10 years minimum to get around to doing the stuff you want, you’re not imminently becoming a retirement home grandma or anything (although with my back sometimes I’m not so sure). Some days you can get up and focus for a bit, many days you can’t. Any progress is good and there are no set-backs.

My experience relates to other aspects of myself and my life, both flexible and immutable, especially neurological disorders (mostly ADHD & Dyspraxia) and things caused by them plus inadequate parenting (I’m sure everyone on this community could tell you this, but that sort of thing is a recipe for a pretty awful self-image). I haven’t experienced HRT or any significant form of gender-related treatment or anything.