She Became Me

I keep coming back to this image.

An elder woman in front of a mirror, contemplating how much of the girl looking back at her still remains. Perhaps she recognises the eyes or the smile. Perhaps, beneath everything the years have gently written upon her face, she still feels exactly like that girl staring back.

At first glance, it would be easy to see an image about ageing: youth on one side of the glass and age on the other, a reminder of everything that has passed. But that’s not what I see.

I see everything that happened in between.

I see a girl who grew into a woman, and a woman who gradually discovered the confidence and freedom to become entirely herself. I wonder about all the experiences between those two reflections, all the expectations she encountered, all the things she was told she should be, and all the things she eventually discovered for herself.

As we grow from girls into women, we quickly discover just how many expectations the world seems to have of us — how we should look, how we should behave and even who we should become.

We learn remarkably young that our bodies attract opinions. We can be too big or too small, too curvy or too thin, pretty or plain, sexy or frumpy, too much or somehow still not enough. We’re encouraged to be attractive and then warned about attracting attention. We’re told to be confident, but not intimidating; independent, but accommodating; strong, but preferably not so strong that somebody else feels uncomfortable.

And naturally, we should smile more.

Apparently the female face has been suffering from a chronic shortage of smiling for generations.

We laugh because sometimes laughter really is the best response, but beneath the humour is something many of us understand. When the world spends long enough looking at us, eventually we can begin looking at ourselves through its eyes.

We stand before mirrors and don’t simply see ourselves anymore. We inspect ourselves. We notice the stomach, the breasts, the hips, the hair, the skin, the weight and eventually the lines. All those perfectly ordinary parts of being human somehow become questions about whether we’re attractive enough, feminine enough, doing this correctly or, ultimately, whether we’re enough.

What an enormous amount of our lives we can spend trying to answer questions we never needed to ask.

Because while we’re worrying about how life looks upon our bodies, something infinitely more interesting is happening.

We’re living it.

We’re laughing until our stomachs hurt, making friendships, falling in love, falling out of love, finding ourselves and occasionally losing ourselves before finding our way back again. We’re taking chances, changing our minds, making mistakes and hopefully collecting some wonderful stories along the way. We discover things we’re brilliant at and, with considerably less enthusiasm, discover a few things we absolutely aren’t.

We dream, worry, celebrate, cry, laugh, fall down and get back up. Somewhere amongst all those wonderfully ordinary days, the girl becomes a woman.

Perhaps she becomes a mother. Perhaps she doesn’t. Perhaps motherhood becomes one of the greatest adventures of her life, or perhaps her greatest adventures take her somewhere entirely different. There is no single correct way to be a woman, no qualification exam, compulsory uniform, approved body or prescribed destination.

Some of us become mothers, some of us don’t, some desperately want to and cannot, while others choose lives that follow completely different paths. Every one of those lives can be rich, meaningful and beautifully complete.

For those of us who do become mothers, we may discover just how astonishingly far a woman’s love can stretch. We nurture, teach, comfort, encourage and protect. We become listeners, problem-solvers, cheerleaders and, mysteriously, the finders of things everybody else insists have vanished from the face of the earth.

Sometimes a woman becomes the quiet heartbeat of a family, holding together a thousand tiny pieces of everyday life that may seem insignificant individually but collectively create something extraordinary: belonging.

There is a reason people sometimes describe women as multipliers. Give a woman love and she can make it grow. Give her a house and she may fill it with everything that makes it a home. Give her groceries and they can become a meal around which people gather, talk and laugh. Share an idea and it can become a plan; share a dream and it can become an adventure; give her friendship and she may give you a bond that lasts a lifetime.

But these things are our gifts, never our obligations. Our ability to care doesn’t mean we exist to serve, and motherhood doesn’t erase the woman who existed before somebody first called her Mum. She is still there, still dreaming and curious, still ambitious and laughing, still learning and wanting things for herself. Still wonderfully and completely her.

Perhaps that’s one of the things the girl in the mirror doesn’t know yet. She doesn’t know just how much she will become.

She may still be worrying about whether she’s pretty enough, whether people like her, whether her body is right, whether she fits in or whether she’s doing life properly. The elder woman has something the girl could never possess, however much we might wish we could give it to our younger selves.

Perspective.

She knows that the stomach she worried about never prevented her from having adventures. The wrinkles she feared never stopped her laughing. Grey hair never silenced her voice, and a changing body never changed her worth.

Somewhere along the journey she may have discovered one of life’s most wonderfully liberating truths: we were never here to be looked at; we were here to live.

Our bodies aren’t ornaments accompanying our lives. They’re where our lives happen. Our legs carry us towards adventures, our arms embrace the people we love and our hands create, comfort, work, build, write, cook and hold other hands. Our breasts change, our stomachs soften, our skin changes and lines gather around eyes that have spent decades smiling, crying, worrying, laughing and watching life unfold.

These things aren’t failures or imperfections. They’re simply part of being alive.

Life leaves its signature.

Perhaps that’s one of the beautiful gifts naturism can offer us as women: not another standard to achieve, but the freedom to stop performing. It allows us to experience our bodies as something we live within rather than something constantly presented for inspection.

Spend enough time among real bodies and perfection becomes remarkably uninteresting. You see scars and stretch marks, wrinkles and different shapes, different breasts and stomachs, different abilities, different ages and thousands of different stories. After a while, something wonderful happens. They stop looking unusual and simply look human.

That, to me, is body acceptance.

It isn’t standing in front of the mirror every morning desperately trying to convince ourselves that we’re beautiful. Some mornings most of us would probably settle for finding the hairbrush. It’s something much deeper than that. It’s understanding that beauty was never the admission price for participating fully in life.

We don’t have to remain young to remain relevant. Motherhood isn’t required to make us complete, a partner isn’t required to make us whole, and somebody else’s desire doesn’t confirm our femininity. We don’t need approval to be ourselves because our value was never dependent upon somebody else’s judgement in the first place.

And equality? Well, here’s the wonderfully simple part: we arrived with that already included.

Equality doesn’t require women and men to be identical. It simply recognises that difference has never meant lesser. We can love one another, complement one another, support one another and build extraordinary lives together while standing exactly where we belong — beside one another, rather than above or beneath.

That’s where partnership becomes something truly wonderful.

Yet through every relationship, every friendship, every love and every chapter, there is one person who accompanies a woman for the entire journey: herself. Other people will know pieces of her story, but she knows the whole thing. She remembers the girl, she knows the woman and, one day, she will meet the elder.

Our bodies, our choices, our femininity, our identities and our lives belong to us.

So when I look at this image now, I don’t imagine the elder woman wishing she could become the girl in the mirror again. I imagine her smiling at everything that girl has yet to discover: the friendships she hasn’t made, the places she hasn’t visited, the laughter she hasn’t laughed, the challenges she doesn’t yet know she’ll overcome, the people she will love, the dreams she will chase and the countless ordinary moments that will eventually become the memories of an extraordinary life.

If she could reach through that mirror and speak to the girl looking back, I don’t think she’d give her a lecture. I think she’d tell her to worry less and live more. To stop shrinking herself and measuring her worth through somebody else’s eyes. To wear the thing, take the photograph, go swimming, travel, dance badly and laugh loudly. To ask questions, say no when she means no and yes when she means yes. To change her mind, start again, take up space, love enormously and forgive herself.

And please, for heaven’s sake, don’t waste perfectly good summers worrying about your stomach.

Because the lines will come, the body will change and the hair will change with it. Youth will pass because youth was never meant to be a permanent destination. None of that means we’re losing ourselves.

Quite the opposite.

We’re gathering ourselves.

Every adventure, heartbreak, friendship, ridiculous moment and lesson becomes part of us. So does every person we’ve loved, every boundary we’ve learned to draw and every occasion when life knocked us down and we quietly decided to stand again.

The years don’t simply take from us. They add to us.

An elder woman isn’t a faded version of the girl she once was. She is that girl enriched by experience, carrying more stories, more knowledge, more laughter, more courage, more memories and more life.

Not diminished, but expanded.

And suddenly this image doesn’t feel sad to me at all. Quite the opposite. It feels wonderfully alive.

The mirror isn’t showing her what she has lost. It’s reminding her how far she has travelled.

Every line carries a memory, every change marks another chapter and every year is evidence of a life that was actually lived.

Life is but a grain of sand in the oceans of time, far too precious to spend trying to become somebody else’s idea of who we should be. So rather than counting wrinkles, perhaps we should count adventures, laughter and friendships. Count the times we loved with our whole hearts, the chances we took, the moments we surprised ourselves and every time we got back up and carried on.

And when one day we meet the elder woman in our own mirror, I hope we greet her with pride. She isn’t the end of our story. She’s another glorious chapter of it, still with things to discover, reasons to laugh, people to love, adventures to have and dreams worth dreaming.

Whatever our age, whatever our shape, whatever chapter we’re writing and wherever life takes us next, this life belongs to us.

So make memories. Make mistakes. Make a difference. Laugh until your face earns a few more lines, love with your whole heart and make every precious grain of sand count.

There is only one you, and there will only ever be one life quite like yours.

Live, love, smile and, above everything else,

BE YOU.