I Am Losing To Myself At Thirty

Everybody assumes the comparison is with another woman.

It usually is not. There is one that runs deeper than any of those and hardly anybody says it out loud, because it sounds absurd when you put it into words.

You are losing to yourself.

Not to your sister. Not to the woman at the school gate. To a photograph from twelve years ago, of you, at thirty, in a summer you barely remember.

And she wins every time. She has never once lost.

I want to look straight at that, because it is not absurd at all. It is the most rigged contest a person can enter, and once you see how it is built you will understand why nothing you do in the present ever gets anywhere near it.

A contest with one competitor

Look at what she actually is, this woman at thirty.

She is one image. One second, chosen out of about four hundred million seconds of that year, and chosen because it was good. Nobody keeps the other ones.

She is not tired in that picture, because the tired ones got deleted. She is not sad, she is not mid sentence, she is not blinking. Every unflattering second of that entire summer was thrown away and one was kept.

And you are competing against that with a live human being at eleven o'clock at night, in a bathroom, after a full day.

You are entering a live woman against a curated second, and there has never once been a contest anywhere with rules like that. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman how a comparison is actually built, and Philippians 3 has a man deliberately putting behind him what is behind him.

And now the part that nobody says, and it is worth hearing.

You did not think she was winning at the time.

Go back to that summer and remember what you actually thought about your own face. There was a list. There was a thing you did not like. There was a photograph from that same summer that you refused to have printed, and you can probably remember what was wrong with it.

The woman you are losing to was, at the time, a woman who thought she was losing to somebody else.

You are losing to somebody who did not think she was winning, and that summer has never once been experienced by anybody as a good year for a face. Scripture in Philippians 3 has Paul deliberately not counting what is behind him, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a woman the truth about a year she has been idealizing.

Forgetting those things which are behind

Paul says something in Philippians that is not sentimental and is one of the most useful sentences in the letters.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before. (Philippians 3:13, King James Version)

Forgetting those things which are behind.

Now, he does not mean a failure of memory. Paul remembers his past constantly and writes about it in detail. What he means is a refusal to give it weight, an active decision that what is behind does not get a vote in what is in front.

And notice that he does it as a discipline. This one thing I do. It is a practice rather than a feeling, and he says he is still doing it, which means it is not finished for him either.

You are permitted to decline to give a photograph a vote, and forgetting has never once meant losing a memory. It is written in Philippians 3 that he is forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth to those before, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman take the weight off a year.

And look at what is on the other side of it.

Reaching forth unto those things which are before. There is a direction in that sentence, and it is forward, and Paul has that direction at an age when the world would say his best years were behind him.

The contest you are running has the opposite direction built into it. It assumes the best thing already happened and everything since is a falling away, and Paul, who had a considerably harder life than most, does not read a life that way at any point.

You are given a direction that has never once run backward in Scripture, and no verse anywhere puts a person's best year behind them. The Spirit of God is what turns a woman around inside a contest she has been running facing the wrong way, and the written word says reaching forth unto those things which are before.

Move the photograph

So here is the assignment, and it is physical rather than emotional.

Move one old photograph of yourself out of the place where you keep seeing it.

Not delete. This is not about destroying anything, and destroying it would be another kind of intensity. Move it. Off the shelf and into a drawer, out of the album that gets opened, into a folder on your phone that is not the one you scroll.

Somewhere it exists and is not in your daily eyeline.

You are able to let something exist without looking at it every day, and no photograph has ever once been owed a place on a shelf. Philippians 3 says forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a woman's eyes forward.

Here is why moving rather than deleting. Deleting says the woman in it was an enemy, and she was not. She was a tired thirty year old who thought she was losing to somebody else. She deserves better than being deleted.

But she does not need to be on a shelf at eye height, twelve years later, entering a contest every time you walk past.

And afterward, do one warm slow thing for your body, in the present tense, with no photograph anywhere in the room.

You are able to take a competitor out of a ring by moving a frame four feet, and no photograph has ever once needed to be destroyed to stop it competing. The written word in Philippians 3 puts the reaching forward and the forgetting in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is what makes ten warm minutes into care in the present rather than a comparison with the past.