styleandserenity.com · May 2026
When do we finally see ourselves? Not the flaws, not the things we’d change, but really, truly see ourselves. I have been asking myself that question a lot lately. And honestly, I don’t have the answer yet.
I have always cared about the way I look. That’s just the truth about me. The way I carry myself, the way I walk into a room, it has always mattered to me. For a long time that felt like a strength. What I didn’t see coming was that the same woman who cared so deeply would one day find aging so hard to sit with. Because it is hard. Some mornings I look in the mirror and I genuinely don’t recognize the face looking back at me. The lines. The changes. Everything quietly different from what it used to be. And I have to just stand there and absorb it.
Nobody prepares you for that feeling.
There’s a saying that youth is wasted on the young. I thought I understood it. I didn’t. Not until I started looking back at old photographs and realized that the flaws I spent so much time focusing on barely existed. I went straight to the flaw every single time. My body, my face, whatever it was that day. The good was right there and I kept walking past it. The real story, the one that was actually happening, I missed it completely.
I see it now in my daughter. She is so beautiful it is almost hard to look at sometimes. And she doesn’t see it. She finds the same things I found, the same flaws that aren’t really there, the same quiet criticism of herself that I know so well. I want to take her face in my hands and tell her to see herself right now, please. Because one day she is going to look back and wonder how she ever doubted what she had.
I know because that is exactly what happened to me.
And so here I am, on the other side of that, struggling with a different mirror. That’s the part that gets me. I wasn’t fully happy with myself then and I’m working hard to be happy with myself now. So when? When do we get to just be okay with what we see? When does that become something we actually feel and not just something we tell ourselves?
I want to be clear about something because I think it matters. I am not here to tell anyone how to handle this. I am not a proponent of one path or another. Age naturally, do something about it, whatever makes you feel like yourself. That is entirely your own business and it deserves no one’s judgment, including mine. Getting older is different for every single person. Every man, every woman. We all carry it differently. We all have our own quiet negotiations with who we are becoming.
What I am doing is trying to figure out my own path. What it looks like to genuinely feel good about myself now, a woman in her 50s and soon….in my sixties, and in my seventies. Not out of vanity. Not out of fear. But because I deserve to finally look at myself with the same kindness I have always been willing to give to everyone else.
That is the real journey for me. Finding the true woman underneath all of it. The one who has loved deeply and lost people she didn’t know how to survive losing, and survived. The one who has shown up when it was hard. She has been here the whole time.
I am just finally starting to look for her.