What stayed while everything else changed….
I didn’t expect an old home video to change the way I saw myself.
A friend recently sent me a video from a party I threw in 1998. I barely remembered the details — who was there, what we ate, what music was playing. But I remembered how I felt watching it.
I was so hard on myself back then. So unsure. So quick to find fault.
And yet, watching her on the screen, I was transfixed.
She was so alive — laughing easily, moving through the party without hesitation, completely unaware of how she might be perceived. I couldn’t stop looking at her.
And my first thought was: She is beautiful.
It surprised me — how immediate that thought was. How gentle.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to notice something unsettling. Women of a certain age begin to fade from view. Not all at once, but gradually. We become competent, reliable, and steady. We stop being the ingénue. We stop being the center of the frame.
Watching that video, I saw my younger self lit up with a kind of openness I hadn’t realized I missed.
And I understood something I hadn’t expected.
She wasn’t gone. I had just stopped looking for her.
On my kitchen windowsill, a small Hello Kitty Chef has been sitting since that same year—that party.
She was left behind by my friend’s daughter. That night, I placed her on the kitchen windowsill for safekeeping, and somehow, she never left.
My friend declined to claim her and for some reason, I couldn’t let her go.
She has sat in my kitchen window for nearly thirty years now. Through different houses. Different kitchens. Different relationships. Different versions of me.
Always in the light.
Long enough that I stopped really noticing her. She became part of the room. Part of the background. Something constant.
Through louder years and quieter ones. Through certainty and uncertainty. Through joy, grief, reinvention, exhaustion, hope.
She stayed exactly the same.
Houses changed. Kitchens changed. I changed. But she stayed.
She’s still there. On the windowsill. Where I’ve always made a place for her.
And maybe what moved me wasn’t just the video. It was the realization that something in me had remained, too.
There were years I changed everything else. What I liked. What I valued. What I thought I was supposed to outgrow in order to become the next version of myself.
How many things we believe we’ve outgrown are not actually gone — only set aside for a while.
How easy it is to distance ourselves from parts of who we were simply because they no longer seem to fit the person we think we’re supposed to become.
But not her. She never asked to be explained.
She never needed to fit into whatever version of adulthood I was trying to perform at the time. She just stayed.
Quiet. Unchanged. Watching.
Some things wait for us patiently anyway.
Because the truth is, there are still days when I don’t feel beautiful or hopeful. Days when I catch my reflection and see a body that has softened and shifted in ways I didn’t expect. Days when I feel tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.
Days when “hopeful” feels like too strong a word.
Watching the video, I wanted to tell that young woman what she could not see about herself. Then I looked at the little figure in my window and thought of all the years since that party. She had been there for the young woman in the video, and for every version of me who came after.
Somewhere along the way, I had begun to think of her as someone I used to be. The figurine made that harder to believe. It had traveled with me from kitchen to kitchen while I grew older, lost people, changed my mind, and carried on. I was the one who kept finding a place for it.
Watching her, I recognized a part of myself I had lost sight of. That part of me got buried beneath responsibility, self-criticism, grief, survival, and the slow subtle ways women learn to stop seeing themselves clearly. Maybe I had stopped offering myself the kindness I felt for her so easily.
I can look at her now without searching for what was wrong with her. I wonder what it would be like to give the woman standing at this window the same grace.
Hello Kitty is still there, in the light. And so am I.