A memory from Facebook appeared on my screen today. The photograph was taken in 2015, I was sixty. One of my friends commented, "Julia, you looked fabulous."
I smiled because my first thought was exactly the same. I did look fabulous.
The funny part is... I don't remember thinking that ten years ago.
Back then, I probably noticed the things I wished were different. Perhaps my hair. Perhaps a few wrinkles beginning to appear. Perhaps something no one else even saw.
Today, at seventy-one, I look at that same photograph with completely different eyes. I don't see flaws. I see a woman who looked beautiful for sixty, then I realized something.
Time plays a curious trick on us. The present is often a little blinding. We notice everything we wish we could change. The past, however, sees us much more gently. We look at old photographs and think, "Why didn't I know then what I can see so clearly now?"
Somewhere along the way, something changed inside me. I stopped comparing myself to the woman I had been decades earlier. Instead, I began seeing myself as I was at each stage of life.
Today I look in the mirror and I see wrinkles. A softer neck. A face that has changed.
But I also see seventy-one years of laughter, mistakes, courage, travel, friendships, heartbreak, joy, and beginnings. Perhaps beauty was never about looking younger.
Perhaps beauty was learning to see ourselves with kinder eyes while we're living the moment, not twenty years later.
Because if we're lucky enough to reach eighty, I have a feeling we'll look back at seventy-one and smile once again.
And we'll probably say,
"What was I worrying about? I looked wonderful."