Style & Serenity

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.

When I think of her, it’s like sunshine. Warm. Safe. Pure love.
And then the ache — because I can’t call her. Can’t say Mom, I love you. Can’t hear her voice when I need it most.

Her name was Aziza. In Persian it means beloved. Cherished. Precious. Powerful. She was all of those things and then some.
She grew up as the daughter of a governor general in Afghanistan.

As a young girl she stood beside her father in rooms filled with kings and diplomats and world leaders.

She learned early what it meant to carry yourself with grace. To speak to anyone. To make everyone in the room feel seen.
She survived polio as a child. Was paralyzed. The doctors had their doubts. She had none. She walked again. That was Aziza — she always did what everyone said couldn’t be done.
She came to America as a diplomat’s wife, four children in tow, and built a home from nothing. No family. No friends. Just a foreign country and the quiet determination to make it work. No announcement. No applause. Just love — steady and unshakeable.

We didn’t just love her. Each of us called her our best friend. All of us. That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens when a mother shows up so fully, so completely, that her children never feel the need to look for that kind of love anywhere else.
She loved everyone who came into her family as if they had always been there. Her heart had no edges. She taught us to look beyond ourselves — joining the other UN diplomatic wives organizing drives for children across the world who needed just the essentials.
She was the root system beneath everything that grew.
And then my father got sick.
She sat beside him quietly and loved him through it. And when he left, just four months later, she told me she could not live without him.
And she didn’t.
Not because she was weak. She was the furthest thing from weak. But because some loves are so complete, so total, so woven into the fabric of who you are — that when that person leaves, part of you goes with them.
She chose him. Even at the end. She chose him.

If you’re reading this without your mother today — I see you. Maybe she was everything like mine was. Maybe it was complicated. Maybe you’re still figuring out what her absence means. It doesn’t matter. The ache is the same. That empty space where she used to be — we all carry it differently but we all carry it.
You are not alone today.

Mama, I just want to say thank you. For protecting us. For loving us. For making us feel safe and truly seen. You were the softest person I have ever known. And the strongest. You were pure magic.
I miss you every single moment of every single day.
Happy Mother’s Day.

We’ve all been in that room. Someone walks in and everything changes. The energy shifts, People lean in. And you find yourself thinking, what is it about them? What do they have that the rest of us don’t?

The answer is simpler than you think.

Most of us don’t realize we’re doing it. But we are.

With our partners. With our kids. With our friends. We keep a running mental list of everything that bothers us. The habits that irritate us. The things they forget. The ways they fall short. We don’t write it down. We don’t need to. It lives in the back of our minds, quietly shaping how we speak to them, how we look at them, how we respond when they walk into the room.

And here’s the problem with a scorecard, someone always loses. Usually everyone.

Energy doesn’t lie. When you’ve mentally checked out on someone, when all you’re tracking is what they do wrong, they feel it even when you say nothing. And people who feel unappreciated don’t show up as their best selves. They just stop trying.

You focus on the negative. The relationship reflects it back.

At some point the score stops feeling worth keeping. You stop adding to the list. You stop replaying what bothers you. And that’s when something shifts, you start asking a different question. What is this person actually giving me that I’ve stopped noticing?

Look at your partner, not the small stuff but the real stuff. The loyalty. The consistency. The way they show up when it matters. The things that would devastate you if they were gone.

Look at your teenager, not the mess, not the attitude, not the eye roll…but the hard work, the effort, the person still figuring themselves out under all that noise.

Look at your friend, not the ways they’ve disappointed you, but the years, the history, the genuine care underneath the imperfection.

And when that shift happens, when the focus moves, something remarkable follows.
The relationship changes.
Not because the other person changed. Because YOU DID.

This is the part most people miss. We walk through our relationships feeling like passengers. Like the dynamic is something that happens to us. Like we’re just responding to whoever the other person is that day.

But that’s not true.

Your tone sets the temperature in the room. Your words either open people up or shut them down. Your attention, real, genuine attention is one of the most powerful things you can offer another human being. And it costs you nothing.

When you speak to someone with warmth, they soften. When you lead with kindness, they mirror it. When you choose to see what’s good in a person, they often rise to meet that version of themselves.

This isn’t magic. It’s just human nature.

We become who we are seen as. We respond to how we are treated. We open up when we feel safe and close down when we feel judged.

You are not powerless in your relationships. You never were.
Start small. The next time something minor irritates you about someone you love pause. Just for a second. And ask yourself, what is this person doing right?

Not to excuse what bothers you. Not to pretend everything is perfect. But to recalibrate. To remember the whole person standing in front of you.

Do it with your partner. Your kids. Your friends. The colleague who gets on your nerves. The stranger behind the counter who looks like they’re having the hardest day.

See them. Really see them.

Your reaction has the power to change the situation itself. Use it.

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