Breaking Free: Rediscovering Beauty in Your 40s and 50s

When I was 10, my neighbor leaned into my ear while we were at church & whispered that I needed to talk to my mother about getting a bra for me. My nipples were poking through my shirt. My cheeks flamed red & I stared resolutely ahead of me. That same year, I was walking through the commissary in Jacksonville with my dad when a man in his 50s walked past us and very obviously stared at my chest. I was wearing a loose, plain t-shirt.

When I was 12, the boys on my street with whom I grew up accused me of stuffing my bra while we were playing tag in my backyard. At the time, I shrugged it off, but when I went inside after we were done playing, I cried. I didn’t even want a chest because I was still interested in playing with Barbies & yet I had boys telling me I was stuffing tissues down my shirt.  

A boy who sat behind me in 7th grade math class would repeatedly snap my bra strap and, despite my complaints, our teacher would not move him or tell him to keep his hands to himself. 

I briefly “dated” a boy with ginger red hair & beautiful blue eyes, whom I’d been crushing on forever, only to have him dump me & tell people he just wanted to feel my chest because it was bigger than most of the other girls in our grade. I was 14 and in 8th grade.

In high school, I always had boys trying to cop feels, & one day while I was walking down the hallway, one of them stuck his hand out & poked me right in my nipple. 

When I was 15 or 16, I was standing outside a store in the mall with my parents and sister when a man and his teenaged son walked up to look in the window…until I glanced up and saw the father trying to look down my shirt.

“Your face isn’t the problem.”

As an adult in my 20s, I had a grown man tell me “Your face isn’t the problem”, hinting that my body WAS.  Another said he was so disgusted, he “couldn’t even finish.”  Ironically, I remember nothing about that interlude (not even that it happened) but I remember the way I felt when a mutual friend shared what was said about me.

All of these experiences have shaped the way I look at & feel about my body. I wore really baggy clothes all through high school because, hey, it was the 90s & that was our thing, but I was also hiding myself because I was afraid of attention. I have navigated most of my life this way.

Interspersed in between all of these bad experiences were friends and lovers telling me I was cute. I had a rockin’ body. That I was adorable. I didn’t believe them because I was too focused on all the things I’d been told were wrong with me, it left no room to hear the positives.

I’ve been coming into a new relationship with my body for the last several years.  I’d never been comfortable in it, loved it, or wanted to show it off. I used to tell myself I simply wasn’t vain so I didn’t need to do any of those things, but the reality is that I was hiding it because I was afraid.  Afraid of judgment, looks, and scrutiny.

Then one hot, summer’s day in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I had to run to the store for beach supplies. As I stood in the parking lot of the local Walmart, I had an epiphany: I was making myself uncomfortable to save everyone else from seeing my body, and everyone else is probably just like me, so focused on their internal insecurities, they aren’t paying attention to me. Wear the damn shorts, Jennifer!

And that was the first time I put on shorts in years. A decade, maybe.

So it was a really big deal when I finally did my own boudoir session. I was suddenly exposed, someone else could see all of me. It was scary but also…liberating.   It changed my perspective of myself. It made me realize I am worthy of feeling beautiful and there is nothing wrong with that.

Our bodies do a lot for us every single day and they deserve to get noticed and appreciated. They get us through really amazing highs, and sometimes pretty terrible lows.  There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel pretty, beloved, or beautiful. All of those things give us great heaps of confidence, which carries us through the harder parts of life.

There is also nothing wrong with wanting to make changes to it. This is why I call myself “body-neutral” because I can recognize that I want to change something but still celebrate how far this body of mine has brought me.

So here you go: me in a Pinsy bodysuit and a black blazer giving the camera my best Aubrey Plaza stare while I am certainly feeling every inch as cute and pretty as I always should have. I’ve been sexualized almost my entire life without my permission, so now I’m taking back the controls and owning all of this body the universe decided to give to me. 

It’s time you do, too.