I May Always Be Her
I’ve been thinking a lot about aging lately about what it means, what it looks like, and whether I’ll ever truly accept it.
I don’t think I will.
And maybe not for the reasons people assume.
It’s not just the deeper lines in my smile, or the subtle shift in my voice, or the way my body has changed hips widening, skin tracing a different story than it once did. Yes, I notice those things. Of course I do. But that’s not what’s on my mind.
What I find myself chasing isn’t a look.
It’s a feeling.
A giggle that comes from nowhere and everywhere. A kind of purity in existing that I’m not even sure I ever fully had. And if I did, like most of us, I didn’t know how to hold onto it. I didn’t know I was supposed to.
I remember people always saying, “Enjoy being young. It goes by so fast. It’s the best time of your life.”
I never believed them.
Because I wasn’t enjoying it.
I didn’t feel free I felt confined. I hated rules. I hated feeling small, like I had no power over my own life. It didn’t feel like the best time. It felt like something to survive.
And yet… there was something there.
Not in the circumstances, but in the mind.
Possibility lived there. Limitless and unchallenged, simply because I believed it to be. Because I hadn’t yet learned all the reasons why I couldn’t.
That’s what I miss.
Not youth itself but the openness of it.
So here I am, 25 years old, and somehow still her.
A little girl in quiet moments.
I feel her when I brush my hair…my real hair, not my expensive extensions.
When I make myself tea.
When I sit still long enough to just be.
When I take myself to get my nails done, or step into a place I once only saw in books, imagining what it would feel like to be there.
She’s still here.
Maybe she always will be.
And maybe that’s not something to outgrow, or to leave behind, or to mourn.
Maybe it’s something to protect.
Because even if time takes everything else
that feeling, that softness, that quiet wonder
that little girl is mine.
And I think I’ll keep her.