The task was simple, almost administrative. I needed a few images from my solo trips before moving to Germany to accompany a recent post about what solo travel looks like now as a new mom. Then versus now. Motion versus almost-stillness. A life once lived lightly compared to a life lived with a small human always factored into the equation.

I opened old folders. Cities, beaches, lots of them, surfaced first. Streets I remembered by smell. Cafés I remembered by how long I lingered. Airports I remembered because I had no one waiting for me on the other side and no one expecting updates. Just me, a wheeled backpack, and a body that moved through her chosen world unquestioned.

And then there she was. The woman in the photos. Late twenties. Early thirties. Mid-thirties. Unapologetically present. Legs grounded. Shoulders relaxed. A body that knew how to exist in public without constantly negotiating itself.

The months-away-from-turning-forty version of me looked at her and felt something close to awe. To put it plainly, the forty-year-old version of me found this younger Jona smoking hot.

Not in a sentimental way. Not in a softened, forgiving way that time sometimes gives us. It was visceral. Immediate. I admired her body. Her curves. Her ease. Her physical confidence, even when she wasn’t consciously confident. I admired the way she stood, the way clothes fell on her, the way she occupied space without shrinking. Her ever messy nest of a hair. 

And almost immediately, another memory followed. Because I remember her just as clearly as I see her now. I remember how she unforgiving and how unkind she was with her body.

How she could not look at a photo without dissecting it. How every curve had to be justified. How every fold needed an explanation. How softness was not allowed to exist without being framed as a failure. How she would zoom in, crop out, angle-adjust, second-guess.

I remember how long it took her to choose a single photo. One image that barely passed her standards. One image she would still apologize for posting. One image she would revisit later and wonder if she should take it down. And sometimes she did.

No, her standards were not high. They were hostile. Toxic. Very unfeminist—a slapping contradiction of her preferred prefix to her name: feminist Jona.

She believed that her body was something that needed constant supervision. That left unattended, it would betray her. She believed that discipline was love. That control was care. That kindness would make her complacent.

Looking at those photos now, the cruelty is obvious. What surprised me most was not that I had been unkind. It was how predictable the pattern was.

Because I’ve done this before. At thirty, I looked at photos of my twenty-five-year-old self and thought, wow, I was actually beautiful. At twenty-five, I looked at photos of my twenty-year-old self and thought the same.

Each version of me only became beautiful once she was safely in the past. Once she could no longer ask anything of me. Once she could no longer be lived in. It’s unsettling to realize how often we outsource compassion to hindsight.

There is something deeply flawed about a system where appreciation is always delayed. Where we only soften once the body in question has already changed. Where kindness arrives late, like an apology written after the damage is done.

And here I am now. A perimenopausal, postpartum mother on the verge of turning forty.

A body that has carried a child. A body that has grown life, labored, delivered, fed, soothed, cut open, stitched, and perpetually scarred. A scar that felt like a rough road to the touch. A body that has been awake in ways younger bodies never had to be. A body that has absorbed fear, responsibility, and love at a cellular level.

And still, I am unforgiving. Still, I catch myself negotiating with mirrors. Still, I compare myself to previous versions or others as if time were a personal failure. Still, I expect this body to recover without rest, to bounce back without being allowed to land.

What makes this harder is knowing better. I know the language. I know the arguments. I know the feminist theory, the body neutrality discourse, the postpartum realities. I know all the right things to say. 

And yet knowing has never been the same as practicing. Because unkindness toward the self is rarely loud. It’s subtle. It hides in expectations. In tone. In the way you speak to yourself when no one is listening. And sometime, it’s never subtle at all: Oh, I look very big. Look at that pouch!

Sometimes unkindness hides in the way you dismiss your body’s exhaustion. In the way you frame rest as laziness. In the way you wait to feel “better” and “productive” before allowing yourself to feel worthy.

I look at my younger self now and feel an unexpected tenderness. Certainly not envy. Tenderness. I see how hard she was trying to be acceptable. How she believed her body was the most fragile part of her identity. How she thought she if she was only skinny so the world wouldn’t withdraw its approval.

She didn’t feel awkward with her curvy body because she was vain. She felt uncomfortable because she thought it was the price of entry. Because she learned, early and thoroughly, that a woman’s body is always under review.

She learned that beauty was conditional. Temporary. Something that could be taken away if she relaxed her grip. So she never relaxed. And now, standing where I am, I can see how much that vigilance cost her. What strikes me is not just how beautiful she was. It’s how little she benefited from that beauty.

She did not rest inside it. She did not trust it. She did not allow it to simply be. And that realization hurts more than any wrinkle or stretch mark ever could. Because what is the point of having something beautiful if you spend the entire time convinced it isn’t enough?

There is a grief that comes with recognizing how much time was lost to self-surveillance. How many moments were lived at a distance. How often joy was filtered through a lens of self-critique. And now motherhood sharpens that grief.

Because my body is no longer just a private project. It is a public lesson. It is the body my child watches me inhabit. The body that moves through rooms, through days, through fatigue. The body that models what self-respect looks like in practice, not theory.

I do not want my child to learn that bodies are something you endure until they improve. I do not want him to learn that a woman’s body is always on trial. I do not want him to inherit my habit of withholding kindness until it feels deserved. After all, we have this daily mantra of thanking the body for all the marvelous things that it does.

This does not mean I suddenly love everything about my body. That expectation would just be another form of pressure. Some days, my body feels foreign. Some days, I miss the ease of movement I once had. Some days I missed the fact I could eat 10 puso without any change in my waistline. Some days, I grieve what has changed without my permission.

All of that can exist without cruelty. Cruelty is not the same as honesty. Honesty says: this is different, and that’s hard. Cruelty says: this is different, and therefore worse.

I am trying now to separate the two.

To speak to my body with accuracy and kindness instead of punishment. To acknowledge change without assigning moral value to it. To allow complexity instead of collapsing everything into judgment. Because here is the part I can no longer ignore: if I continue like this, there will be a future version of me who looks back at photos of this forty-year-old body and thinks, she was beautiful too.

She will see strength I currently overlook. She will see softness as evidence of life well-lived, not failure. She will wonder why I couldn’t see it. I do not want to keep repeating this pattern.I do not want kindness to always arrive late.

When I look at those old photos now, I don’t just see a beautiful body. I see a woman who deserved gentleness in real time. Not years later. Not through nostalgia. Right then and there.

And when I look at myself now, I am trying, imperfectly, to offer that same gentleness without waiting for hindsight to grant permission. Because this body has not betrayed me. It has carried me through countries, transitions, love, loneliness, and birth. It has adapted again and again to the life I asked it to live.

What could possibly be more beautiful than that?

Maybe the real work, at this stage of life, is not learning to love our bodies. Maybe it’s learning to stop being at war with them. To stop demanding proof of worth. To stop waiting until it’s too late to be kind to the very self that has loved you all along.