I’m Beautiful, But…

Dearest gentle reader, it has been a while. I hope you are not under the weather, and I hope wherever you are, you are keeping warm ☻☕︎

I stood before the mirror this morning, as I have done a thousand times before. The light caught the curve of my cheek, the line of my jaw, the way my eyes still hold their color. People tell me I am beautiful. They always have. Family, friends, strangers on the street, the occasional lingering glance that says more than words. For a moment, it feels like armor, but deep down I know that, one day this will not be true.

One day, soon enough in the span of a life. This skin will thin. This eyes will cloud. This posture that I carry without thinking will bend under its own history. The compliments will fade, not because I have become invisible, but because this body that once commanded attention will have completed its arc.

One day, I will no longer look like this.

And no amount of denial will stop it. No amount of money, prayer, discipline, skincare, or longing will stop time from touching me. One day my skin will loosen. My body will become unfamiliar to me. The girl I am now will slowly disappear from the mirror until all that remains is evidence that she once existed.

And I wonder if people understand how heartbreaking that really is.

Not because aging is ugly. But because nobody prepares you for the grief of watching yourself slowly leave yourself behind.

We speak about death often, but nobody speaks enough about the smaller deaths that happen while we are still alive.

The death of childhood. The death of youth. The death of being desired. The death of recognition. The death of the version of yourself you thought would stay forever.

There is a way people talk about life as if it is one continuous thing. As if we do not change into strangers over time. Because we do. You wake up one day and realize you are no longer who you were.

And yet, in the middle of all this change, we cling so tightly to the one part of ourselves that is most temporary… The body.

We keep treating it like it is the final truth of who we are. Like everything about us begins and ends with what can be seen.

But I saw something last week that made that belief feel too small.

Someone was talking about how our body is like a moving carriage, like a car carrying people and things inside it. And they said when a car has an accident, people do not run to the vehicle first. They do not ask about the dents or the glass or the damage to the structure. The first question is always about what was inside. Who was inside. What was being carried. Whether they survived. Whether they are safe. Whether they made it out.

Because nobody ever confuses the car for the life inside it.

The car can be destroyed completely and the question will still remain the same… what happened to the people inside?

And that is when it hits differently. Because that is exactly how the body is.

A moving carriage.

A temporary structure carrying something far more important than itself.

And suddenly, the fear we attach to the body starts to feel misplaced.

Because the body can be damaged, and life still continues inside it in ways that cannot always be seen. We have seen people survive accidents and lose parts of themselves physically, and still remain fully human in ways that cannot be measured by appearance. And we have also seen people whose bodies remain untouched, but something inside them has already collapsed long before anything external changes.

So what exactly are we really trying to preserve when we obsess over appearance?

If this body is only the carriage, then why do we behave as if it is our everything?

Why do we build identity around something that was only ever meant to carry us through time, not define us within it?

Because if I’m being honest, the body will not be what people are asking about at the end.

No one stands at the end of a life and asks how flawless the skin was. No one measures a person’s existence by how long they stayed desirable.

What people ask about is what kind of life was inside that body while it was still moving. What kind of heart was inside it. What kind of presence was inside it. What kind of person was being carried through all those years.

And that is where everything starts to shift for me… Because it means the real work was never on the outside. It was always on the inside.

Because when I strip everything away, when I remove the mirror, when I remove the attention, when I remove what people think they see when they look at me, I am left with only one thing I can answer for.

My heart…

The people I have reached without realizing it. The people I have helped without needing recognition. The people I have made smile when life was too heavy for them to even pretend. The quiet ways I have shown up, even when it was easier not to. The softness I have offered in moments that did not ask for anything impressive, only something human.

That is what I keep coming back to. Not how I looked while I did any of it. But what I gave while I was here.

Because one day, this body will stop carrying me the way it does now. But what I carried inside it will not disappear in the same way.

And I don’t want to exist in people’s memory as just a beautiful face.

I want to exist as something they felt.

Till the pen bleeds again. Thank you for reading