A friend and I were talking recently about women in midlife and beyond.
We laughed about how, at this stage, the dragon is finally unleashed. The people‑pleasing drops. The “Do I have permission?” becomes “Is this worth my time?” We have lived through losses, separations, children leaving, parents needing care and passing, careers ending or reinventing ourselves. We know what matters, and we’re less afraid to say it.
In many ways, this is the most powerful we have ever been.
If the dragon is finally unleashed in this stage of life, it would be a shame if she stayed off camera just when she’s getting most interesting.
And yet, point a lens in our direction and that same dragon will suddenly find something urgent to do in her lair.
The photographer who hid
For years, I had been quite comfortable in the classic “hairdresser with the worst hair” situation: the photographer who helps other women feel seen, quietly hiding behind an image of herself from another era.
I told other women, with complete sincerity, that they deserved to exist in photographs. I believed it. For them.
Relief and shock
Recently, I had my portrait taken. Not because I wanted to, but because I was attending an event and wanted to show up with an up-to-date website.
When I looked at the images, I had two reactions.
My first reaction was shock. Why does the woman in the photograph feel unfamiliar? Not because the photographs were bad. Quite the opposite. Because I looked older than the woman I carry around in my head. It was a strange, slightly sobering moment.
The second was relief. There were enough photographs I could update all my digital profiles from a single session.
But there it was. That gap again. The distance between the remembered face and the current one. The internal photograph that never quite updated, and the external one that keeps insisting on reality.
We see ourselves every day in the mirror, in the little rectangle of our phones. And yet most of us are walking around with a mental photograph that is several years out of date. Then a real photograph arrives and quietly clears its throat: “This is you. Right now.”
The invisible years
Once you start looking for it, you notice a pattern.
We feature heavily in the photos of our twenties and thirties—weddings, babies, birthdays, graduations, new jobs, new houses. We show up in the albums, sometimes in questionable fashion choices, but we are there.
Then, gradually, we begin to slip out of view. We stand behind the camera, offer to “take it,” duck out of the frame “just this once.”
Years later, you can look back through family photos and see a strange gap: a woman who was clearly there for everything, but somehow missing from the evidence.
As if she became camera‑shy right when she became most fully herself.
The dragon at the lens
The part of us that has survived enough birthdays, goodbyes, and reinventions does not actually fear cameras. She’s dealt with worse.
What she really fears is being shrunk—down to one unflattering angle, a bit of harsh light, or a split second where the camera kindly records two chins we didn’t realize we owned and labels it: “This is you now.”
So when a lens turns our way, we don’t necessarily hold our breath, but a lot of us do go on high alert. We straighten, we rearrange, we tilt, we rehearse the “good side” we’re not entirely sure we have. In our heads, a running commentary starts up, circling every so‑called flaw before the shutter has even clicked.
And yet, beneath all that scanning and self‑editing, there is something very simple: A wish not to be edited out. A wish to still appear in the life we are actually living.
When the dragon stays in the picture
If there is a point to all of this, perhaps it is simply this:
We don’t have to love every photograph of ourselves.
But it is a quiet, radical act to allow ourselves to appear in some of them.
To say, “Yes, that’s me. Right now. In this light. In this life.”
To see the dragon—not fire‑breathing, but very much awake—and decide she’s allowed to be visible.
To refuse to keep stepping out of the frame just when we have the most to say.
You have done too much, learned too much, survived too much to be missing from your own visual history.
Perhaps nothing dramatic happens when you allow yourself to be photographed as you are now.
The only thing that happens is this: you look like a woman who has lived.
The dragon will not burn the village down if she allows herself to be seen.
She might, however, leave behind a trail of images that tell the truth:
That she was here.
That she kept going.
That she did not disappear just when she became most fully herself.
And for the people who love her now—and the ones who will remember her later—that will matter more than any perfectly preserved jawline ever could.