As always on weekends, my husband and I go out to do things together. Those days usually include just hanging out and holding hands, having lunches, grabbing and sharing chocolate in one of the chocolateries around LA, shopping, going to the movies, museums … you name it. Anyway, with the summer sale going on, there was this particular weekend when we decided to check out some stores. As you can imagine, there were tons of people shopping in this department store, and they were mostly women. I glanced around and was stunned by the number of women who had their faces or their bodies done. All of those women belonged to a certain age group. It made me think about how society portrays women, and the message that is conveyed to young girls that has led to the further insecurity that has triggered this desire or need to change their bodies.

I’m almost forty. When I was 18 and 20 , I was an extremely charming girl with a very petite yet good body that one would consider to be like a small, girl-like body shape. Closer to my early 30s, I developed a more feminine body shape. My hips become more rounded, my breasts become fuller even though they were never big, my legs become more like a shape that I had wanted them to be for years. My butt was fabulous and my skin was glowing, and I had no idea what a pimple was.

Those were my “golden” years when I was very “juicy ” and attractive.

Only after 35 I started to noticed that my skin started to react to products more sensitively and wrinkles started to appear here and there. I had heard about injections and all kinds of beauty treatments for years, as I had a friend who had tried every possible treatment that was out there on herself. However, it had never occurred to me to do something about my appearance until I turned 36 or even 37. I decided to try out fillers under my eyes, but regretted it big time, and I never did it again.

Anyway, now, I’m almost 40 with a child, with many years of experience and lots of wrinkles. I don’t have a perfect body anymore. I don’t have my great looking butt, flat tummy, glowing skin and perfect hair, but I do have a rich experience called life, I do have a child and tons of lessons, and many other things on top of those. And trust me, for a girl who once was a model, you might think it was challenging; however, I didn’t find that change challenging. It was just the opposite.

I don’t want to have my “perfect” body and great butt in place of everything I have now. I’ll give up that butt any day to have more moments with my child and my husband.

Many women want to change their looks because they can’t accept themselves and all their experiences fully. By undergoing cosmetic surgery and having injections on their faces, women start to erase all kinds of experience they had in their lives. Lie between the lines on our bodies and faces is our unique identity. And by erasing it, we basically erase our identity, but we what do we get instead? We strive to get the perfect forehead like the ones “Susan-from-next-door” or “that-movie-star” has. We want to have the same flat belly that Jane Fonda has and so on. What does it do to us? Any idea? Is there even any kind of an identity in all that? Did it get lost on its own? No, it was erased by us…

By erasing all this, we also erase our moments of happiness and easiness.

We erase our childhood and comfort. We demolish our past and destroy our present by being completely empty in our lives today. What kind of future are we going to create under those conditions? Have you thought about this? Doesn’t it all sound scary? Yes! But we prefer not to think about it, and of course, not to talk about it either. If someone raises that topic, we’ll jump on his or her throat and cross him or her out from our lives for being rude or nosy or weird … or whatever other label we prefer

Instead, we should’ve asked ourselves a ton of questions. The first couple of them being: where are we heading with all the actions that we are taking today, and what is it that we’re going to get in the future?

Well, I do want my future to be bright and happy but I still want to remember my past. I do want to look at myself when I’m 80 and still see my sleepless 20s, when I was young and headless. I also want to see the sleepless nights when I woke up to feed my child. I want to see gray hair that symbolizes my experience in America. I do want to remember where I came from and where I am heading; what are my goals and desires are. Mine! Not someone else’s. Not society’s rules and alterations. No, mine and only.

I do want to chuckle with my husband on words like “remember when I was young and had a great butt”. I do want to remember my pregnancies and everything that relates to them, and if I try to change my face and body — I wouldn’t be me. I’ll be another person. Someone whose personality is based on their physicality, not at all based on their experience. And here we enter the real problem of disconnect.

But that’s a different huge topic that’s reserved for another discussion.

Accepting ourselves the way we are is the only way to heal ourselves. All of us have tons of wounds that we need to heal. But running away from them and hiding is not going to help to solve the issue and make us feel at ease. No it’s just the opposite. It confuses us and our mind more, and we sink deeper and deeper into the darkness of our own demons.

I look at myself in the mirror and see how imperfect I am. I see all my good and bad experiences. I see all the struggles through life and all the challenges I encountered that i still faced in order to learn to grow spiritually. I have a constant reminder about my own family and how it wasn’t perfect, yet they are my only parents whom I adore and love dearly.

I see myself struggling through accepting myself and my new life in the States, along with so many other experiences I’ve had in my life…

I don’t want to go back to my 20s or 30s, and I don’t want to have perfect skin, or a perfect body. I don’t. What I do want is to be able to stand out from the crowd and be noticeable because of my wrinkles, my far-from-ideal tummy, my grey hair that proclaims my life, experience and my soul.

My pain taught me how to love, my pain taught me how to live, My pain taught me how to accept. I don’t want any other life or experience because all of that makes me me — the me I am today — and what’s more precious than that?