I shaved my brows a certain way, and suddenly, the mirror felt like a time machine. The face staring back wasn’t the one I had learned to build — with its practiced angles, its quiet defiance, its attempt at being understood. It was the face of my younger self, the one who used to look at the world with unguarded wonder, before life taught her the art of restraint.
It was strange, almost unsettling, how a simple shift in shape could strip away years of growing up. The reflection staring back at me wasn’t the person I’ve grown into; it was the child who laughed too loudly and smiled with all her teeth, the teenager who hid behind bangs, the version of me who didn’t yet know what it meant to lose parts of herself just to be seen, the one that knew how to hide exhaustion with laughter, how to fake calm with symmetry. No. It was someone smaller, softer. Someone I thought I’d outgrown.
For a moment, I saw the girl I once was — the one who used to sit by the window, sketching faces on the fogged glass, unbothered by the way the world might see her. Her eyes were curious, unfiltered, alive in ways I hadn’t been in a long while. She didn’t care about angles or impressions; she just existed, unshaped by the quiet fear of being misunderstood.
I looked longer. The resemblance deepened — not just in the shape of my brows but in the quiet behind my gaze. I realized how much of her I had buried under years of pretending to be composed, confident, untouchable. Growing up teaches you how to build walls — but it rarely teaches you how to return home to yourself.
And so I stood there, face to face with the version of me that still believed in magic, in softness, in being enough. Maybe that’s what it means to grow — not just to move forward, but to circle back, again and again, until you remember the person you started as.
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