"Fabulous" by Anne Lamott, from Traveling Mercies:
I have this beautiful feminist friend named Nora who once said, “I’ve been thinking about killing myself, but I want to lose five pounds first.” I was remembering this recently when I started liking a new guy. He liked me back but was just getting out of a relationship with a young woman. Young young—she was ten or something, or maybe she just looked that young in the photo he showed me one day. She was tall, coltish, alive, thin, raven-haired. Right around the time I began to think about this guy in the biblical sense, I was at my most incredibly unyoung. I was tired, squinting, jet-lagged, stressed. Of course, I told myself, there is beauty in being older, being a mother, there is beauty in the wise steady gaze. But I kept thinking of this young woman and how beautiful she was and how undilapidated. Later that same day, I went to a mirror and looked for a long time, trying to see the timeless glory of crow's-feet, the resplendence of having survived. Instead I saw a woman in her early forties who grew up playing all day in the sun. Who knew? Then I saw a woman who had had just a few thousand too many social drinks, and then there was the woman who became a single mother. And the long and the short of it is that I looked like a fabulous woman who was on sale at the consignment store.
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