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A few months ago I told a friend, with what I thought was real conviction, that I had made peace with how my face was changing. I remember saying the words out loud, something like, I do not mind it anymore, and meaning it in that moment. Then last week I caught my reflection in a shop window and felt a small, sharp flicker of the exact discomfort I thought I had already worked through.
I stood there for a second, annoyed at myself, as if acceptance were a task you complete once and never have to revisit. It is not. I am starting to understand that more clearly, and it is a little frustrating to understand, because I had wanted the peace to be permanent.
The shop window moment
It was nothing dramatic. Just my reflection caught sideways as I walked past, an angle I do not usually see myself from, showing the slight change in my jawline that has been happening slowly for a couple of years now. For half a second I felt the old flinch, the one I associate with disliking what I saw. Then I kept walking, because I had somewhere to be, and by the time I reached the corner the flinch had mostly faded.
But it happened. That is the part I keep sitting with. It happened even after months of feeling like I had settled something within myself.
Why I think this keeps happening
I do not think acceptance is a single decision I made and then get to keep forever, like signing a form. I think it is closer to a practice, something I have to keep doing, over and over, in small moments that ambush me in shop windows and car mirrors and video calls. Some days the practice holds easily. Other days it does not hold at all, and I am right back to the flinch, even though nothing about my face has changed between one day and the next.
What changes, I think, is not my face but my capacity that day. How tired I am. Whether something else in my life is going well or badly. Whether I slept enough. My face is a fairly constant thing from day to day, but my reaction to it is not constant at all, and for a long time I confused the two, assuming a bad reaction meant something had genuinely gotten worse.
The flinch is not evidence that I was wrong to feel at peace before. It is just evidence that peace needs tending, the way anything does.
Trying not to punish myself for the flinch
My first instinct after the shop window was to be harsh with myself, to think I had failed at something, regressed, undone months of supposed progress in half a second on a sidewalk. I am trying to resist that instinct now. The flinch does not erase the calmer days. It just sits alongside them, another data point rather than proof that the calmer days were fake.
What actually helps, some of the time
I have noticed a few things that seem to shorten the flinch when it happens, though I want to be careful not to oversell them as a fix, because nothing has been a fix so far. Naming it plainly to myself, something like, there is the flinch again, seems to help more than trying to argue myself out of it with reasons. Arguing tends to make it stick around longer, like it wants to be heard before it will leave.
Talking to my mother about it once helped more than I expected. She mentioned, almost offhand, that she still catches herself doing the same thing at her age, decades further into this than I am. I do not know why that comforted me exactly. Maybe just knowing the flinch does not have an expiration date where you are supposed to have outgrown it by a certain age. It seems to just keep showing up, at every age, uninvited.
- I thought I had reached a settled acceptance, then felt the old discomfort resurface without warning.
- The trigger was a sideways reflection in a shop window, an angle I rarely see.
- I am learning my reaction to my face varies day to day even though my face itself does not change that quickly.
- Naming the flinch out loud to myself shortens it more than arguing against it does.
Where this leaves me
I am not going to say I have made peace with my changing face again, because I already said that once and it turned out to be a chapter, not an ending. What I will say is that I noticed the flinch, let it pass through without adding a second layer of self criticism on top of it, and kept walking to wherever I was going that day.
I think that might be the actual practice, not some final state where the flinch never happens again, but getting a little quicker at recognizing it for what it is each time it shows up. I do not know if it gets easier the way my mother’s comment suggested it does not. But I am starting to think easier was never really the goal. Just familiar. Just something I know how to hold when it arrives.
