Some links here are affiliate links. If you buy through one, Glow In My Own Way may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes what I write. More on that.
I was looking for a recipe, one I had photographed off a friend’s cookbook years ago, and instead of finding it I found a folder labeled simply with a year, ten years back. I opened it out of curiosity and then did not close it for almost an hour.
There were maybe forty photos in there. Birthday dinners, a trip to the coast, a few blurry ones taken by someone else at a party I barely remember attending. And in most of them, there I was, a face I recognized immediately and also did not quite recognize, the way you can know a song is yours without remembering writing it.
The two faces side by side
I did something I am slightly embarrassed to admit. I took a current photo on my phone, same angle as best I could manage, and held it up next to the old one on my laptop screen. I wanted to see the difference laid out plainly instead of guessing at it in fragments the way I usually do.
The differences were smaller than I expected and also, somehow, larger. My face is a little fuller under the chin. There is more definition around my eyes when I am not smiling, lines that used to only show up when I laughed and now seem to have taken up permanent residence. My eyebrows sit slightly lower. None of this is dramatic. If I showed the two photos to a stranger they might not immediately clock a decade between them. But I know. I know the way you know your own house in the dark.
What surprised me
I expected to feel sad, and I did, a little, but that was not the main feeling. The main feeling was closer to tenderness, the kind you feel toward someone you used to know well and have not spoken to in a while. That younger face was not more me than this one. It was just an earlier chapter, and I found I did not want to trade this chapter for that one even if I could.
What did make me sad, if I am honest, was noticing how much I had criticized that younger face at the time. I remember thinking my nose looked too prominent in some of those photos. I remember avoiding a few of them being posted anywhere. Looking at them now, I cannot find the flaw I was so sure was there. I just see a face, mine, unbothered by anything I was worried about back then.
I spent years disliking a face I would now consider lovely simply because it was younger. That math does not work out in my favor going forward, and I know it.
What I am trying to learn from this
If I disliked things about my face ten years ago that I now find myself missing or at least neutral about, there is a strong chance I am doing the same thing right now, today, to the face I currently have. Whatever I am unhappy with this year might be something I look back on with the same soft regret in another decade. I cannot fully believe that in the moment, because the moment always feels different, more urgent, more permanent than it turns out to be. But I can hold it as a fact even when I cannot feel it.
The parts that have not changed
Not everything was different between the two photos. My smile is the same, the slightly crooked way one side goes up faster than the other. The small scar above my eyebrow from a childhood bicycle accident is in both, unchanged, a strange little anchor across ten years. Looking for the sameness ended up being almost more moving than looking for the differences.
- The photo comparison showed smaller changes than I braced for.
- My strongest reaction was tenderness, not grief, though grief was in there too.
- I remembered disliking that younger face at the time, which now seems almost impossible to believe.
- A childhood scar above my eyebrow appeared unchanged in both photos, a strange comfort.
Closing the folder
I eventually did find the recipe, in a different folder entirely, misfiled the way most of my digital life is. But I kept the photo folder open in a separate tab for the rest of the night, glancing at it now and then while I cooked. I am not sure what I was looking for by the third or fourth glance. Maybe just permission to sit with both faces at once instead of ranking them.
I do not think I fully believe yet that I will look back on this current face fondly the way I look back on that one. But I noticed the belief starting to form, small and unconvincing, somewhere around the eighth time I compared the two photos. I am going to keep the folder where I can find it. I have a feeling I will open it again.
