Displaying items by tag: future self

Always look at what you have left. Never look at what you have lost. ~Robert H. Schuller

I was looking at a picture of me from about ten years ago. At the time, I was married and life was treating me pretty well. But I recall that time in my life I was unhappy with how I looked. I saw myself as ugly and fat and I was doing everything I could to lose weight. But now when I see that girl from ten years ago, I am stunned by how pretty and thin she was! In the present day, I can see what I couldn’t back then: I was beautiful and thin in that picture!

When I was five years old, my mother enrolled me in a local majorette’s group for kids my age. I whined to her that I didn’t like it and wanted to quit, but she “forced” me to go so I could learn how to twirl and toss and spin a long metal bar with two knobs on either end like her. She was the “best in the school,” said my grandparents. But I was not like my mother. I was uncoordinated, dropped the baton, and had a hard time paying attention. During the parade my group marched in, I carried the banner with our group name on it because I wasn’t good enough to walk and twirl with the others. I quit after the parade.