I always considered myself beautiful: a girl, a young woman, a woman. And people around me confirmed it. I had no complaints about my reflection in the mirror.
I received plenty of compliments, love, and admiration. And I never really thought about how it worked. I didn’t have to work hard. Outward attractiveness was simply an integral part of my life, and I used it like any other resource.
Inevitable Change
And then, with age, everything somehow changed imperceptibly. I began to notice wrinkles, understood why people needed a cosmetologist, and began to toil in the gym to maintain my body and protect it from the onslaught of extra pounds.
A New Reality
And suddenly, I found myself in a new, very strange reality. It turns out that what nature had previously bestowed upon me by default was a down payment.
And now beauty must be earned through daily labor. The free subscription to youth is over; welcome to the premium plan with its exorbitant prices.
Stopping the Ageing Clock
From the natural air you simply breathed, appearance turned into a project requiring regular investment, auditing, and management.
But the main insight of this crisis turned out to be much deeper than just a struggle for skin elasticity.
When you’ve been beautiful your whole life simply by birthright, you become accustomed to admiration and the ease with which you achieve your goals: from the best table at a restaurant to the success of public speaking.
Bam. It’s Autumn
Yes, of course, it’s good to be not only beautiful but also smart.
However, external attractiveness opens many doors effortlessly, because the world is kind to you simply because it’s a flower that pleases the eye.
And then suddenly, bam, it’s autumn. The admiring glances dwindle, and the familiar address of ‘woman’ instead of ‘girl,’ which so jarred, becomes the new reality.
What happened?
The inner narcissist on stage wonders: where have the spotlight and the audience gone?
Age is a great and very harsh instrument for gaining subjectivity. It takes away the outer, shaky support and confronts you with the fact: what will we rely on now that the façade is changing?
WHO sits inside this body?
And this is where the real self-discovery begins. You suddenly realize that adult attractiveness isn’t about the absence of nasolabial folds, but about the scale of your personality, about your expression, about WHO sits inside this body.
Beauty in youth is simply a random win in the genetic lottery, a gift from nature.
As you age beauty drifts inwards
Beauty in maturity is your own personal, conscious work, the quality of your mind and the ability to respect your changes without frantically trying to hold on to a resource that no longer belongs to you.
You finally take attention away from others and transfer it within.
What do you think?
And when did you first realize that your body and appearance were changing? And what inner meanings did you learn to rely on when the mirror stopped giving you enthusiastic compliments? I’m waiting for you in the comments. Let readers know what you think
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Categories: healthcare
Michael Walsh Stories and Books 
Those girls are oh so lovely. They still got it and it is never going away.
I may be chronologically aging, inside I’m the same as lil’ shaver guy.
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women age like milk, men like wine….now if that sounds cruel, consider the other side of that, when they’re young, women are at their peak, while men are worth very little unless an heir of a family fortune, genetic marvel, etc. Men have to earn their value over decades, women get theirs handed to them early on, but with a fast sell by date.
That explains a lot of what used to be “traditional” courtship and marriage and how the (((bolsheviks))) upended things in the 60s forward. Now, women are told they can age like men, go do a “jewish day care” job for several decades until reproduction is a rare miracle, requiring scientific interference, and even at that, the resulting children are of less vigor than traditional birthing ages. It’s causing a decay of society as men, who traditionally many were surplus to a societies survival, used to be able to be soldiers dying in numbers to keep the balance in pre industrial wars, or explorers, engineers, surveyors, etc. that a man who was not prime marriage material could either find a meaningful life, or build some value for marriage if they made it back home.
Now all the frontiers are mapped, wars are small and managed, so you have several women holding out of that alpha chad who one time banged them when they needed a quick lay and now they think they should have that all the time, and men who are surplus to the needs of society and sub top 5-10%, we have a case where 70-80% of ppl are either not going to reproduce, or do so in a begrudging fashion, older than ideal, paired less than ideal and with kids who will grow up weaker and weaker over the generations minus the top 10-20 % of people. We need to go back to the old ways, they were around for a reason.
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