Two photographs a year apart

Do something slightly uncomfortable today. Find a photograph of yourself from around the time you stopped smoking, and put it next to one from this month. Not a flattering one. A real one, ordinary light, no angle chosen. Then look at the two of them like you are looking at somebody else, somebody you are fond of. Give it a full minute. Most people never actually look at themselves, they just check, quickly, the way you check a stove is off.

You did not get younger. Nobody does. What you are seeing is something better and stranger: the acceleration stopped. For years your face was aging faster than the calendar was, the color of it, the skin around the eyes, the tiredness that sat there even on a rested day. A year has passed and you look, at worst, a year older. That is the whole finding. You are back on your own schedule.

There is a quieter change in the photographs, and it is not in your skin. It is in your eyes, and it is what happens to a person who has stopped keeping a secret from themselves. The mirror used to be somewhere you did quick business. You looked at your teeth, your hair, the thing you needed to fix, and you did not meet your own eyes, because meeting them meant a conversation you were not ready to have. That conversation is over. You won it.

Keep both pictures somewhere you will find them again. Then do the harder thing: stop editing yourself out of photographs. Get in the family shot. Let someone take one of you laughing badly. You have spent years being the person behind the camera, and part of that was not modesty, it was avoidance. God has been repairing something in you that no filter does, and it is showing. Let there be a picture of you from this year. Take another one next spring.