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A couple of years ago my husband and I took this picture together – happy and exhausted after a day exploring the Louvre with our 2 year old daughter. This should have been a framer. I remember thinking when we snapped it, that it would be. But when I looked at it on the train ride back that night, I couldn’t believe how old we looked. Whoa, when had that happened? Wrinkles around our eyes, all around my smile. I kept flipping through pictures from the day, and ended up posting some of our sweet kid running through the grounds looking young and happy. I buried our photo and for a while after, I didn’t smile quite so big for the camera and I kept my eyes opened unnaturally wide like I was a deer in the headlights. I had been caught off guard by our picture; rattled by the realization that our youthfulness wouldn’t last. It had for so long, seemed like it just might last forever.

This pity party was muddled by two distinct worries that were caught up together though, and separating them out helped a lot. The two thoughts were that we looked old and we were old and quite frankly the latter just wasn’t true.

At 31, I’m not even middle-age yet, but I already feel that I look old? There is something so wrong with that. I certainly don’t feel old. It’s no wonder my vanity got the best of me – youth and beauty are so messily tied up in our minds. We lose that ‘youthful beauty’ pretty early on according to today’s standards. People start using fillers and getting work done when they are still so young and the upkeep must be daunting. We airbrush every little wrinkle out of magazine covers and even personal photos which only creates a disconnect from our printed (or posted presence) and real life. Sorry, but I am not ready to put up that facade just yet and I seriously hope that at 45, 60, and 90, I’m still in the same mindset.

Yesterday was Thursday and I was in the mood to post a #tbt (Throw Back Thursday) and for some reason this photo popped into my head. I dug it out of our iPhoto folders and looked again at the wrinkles. I could just soften the focus I thought, so that the lines weren’t so harsh. But I didn’t. Instead, I tried really hard to look at the wrinkles for what they actually were – laugh lines from 30 years of having fun, lines around the eyes from so many beautiful days squinting in the sun, and lines around the corners of my mouth from 10 years of grinning with my best friend.

So there you go. The picture that scared the crap out of me, taught me a few things, and then made it feel all ok again.