I was clearing cloud storage during a slow work call and hit a folder from a 2017 family cookout. I remembered the day — humid, bug spray, my nephew face-deep in watermelon — but I’d forgotten what I looked like in the background. Not in a shame-spiral way. More like looking at a cousin I haven’t seen in years.
I’ve been at this since 2022, down 63 pounds, maintaining for about eight months. The scale has been almost boring lately, which is its own kind of win.
But that photo did something the scale can’t: it showed me how long I’d been carrying extra weight before I even had language for it. I didn’t delete it. I didn’t post it. I just left it in the folder.
There was a thread here a while back about keeping old pictures as data instead of ammunition, and I get it now. Anyone else have an old photo that lands differently than you expected?