The Girl I Used to Be
I want to tell you about a girl I used to know.
She was anxious. Desperate to be liked. Always had a boyfriend because the thought of being alone felt unbearable. She had a few best friends and kept almost everyone else at arm’s length... not because she didn’t want connection, but because she was terrified of rejection. She always assumed people were saying negative things about her and she trusted very few people.
That girl was me.
I spent so much of my younger years trying to fit in. Trying to be liked, and instead I often isolated myself from making new friends. I came across as the shy girl, but I was more so the insecure girl. Isn’t it odd how we spend so much time trying to be liked by people who probably never think about us after graduation anyway? And the cruelest part is that none of it mattered. The day you walk across that stage and snag your diploma, the people you spent so much time worrying about impressing just go on with their lives. They aren’t thinking about you at all. But I didn’t know that then.
Even when I became a mother, something didn’t shift the way I thought it would. I still hid. I may have stopped trying to be perfect for other people, but instead I started hiding behind my kids. They became the reason I could stay behind the camera. If there was a photo I didn’t like how I looked in... it didn’t get shared. I became the woman behind the camera instead of the woman in front of it.
Because I hated my body. I had struggled with my weight since my first pregnancy thirty years ago. And somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that no one would like me if they saw the real me. What nobody tells you is that it takes decades to unlearn that.
I’m in my fifties now, and something has quietly shifted in me that I can’t fully explain. I don’t look at other women and wish I looked like them anymore. When I see a beautiful woman, I just think... wow. She is gorgeous. I love her hair, she has beautiful eyes, etc. I’m no longer comparing myself.
I think this is what happens when you finally start making peace with yourself. You see other women differently and you no longer see them as someone you need to measure yourself against. Women are not meant to be perfect. I just wish we didn’t have to wait until our fifties to finally figure that out.
Sometimes I think about that girl I once was. I wish I could sit beside her for a minute and tell her that the things she was so worried about didn’t matter nearly as much as she thought they did. I wish I could tell her to be in the pictures, make new friends, and stop worrying so much about what other people think.
Because she was never the problem. She just didn’t know that yet.