My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Body Confidence After 50: I Bought Lingerie Just for Me
By Patricia, 57 — Philadelphia, PA
I never thought body confidence after 50 was something I would have to learn from scratch. I had spent thirty-one years running a school — managing budgets, calming panicked parents, holding the line when a teenager tested every boundary I set. I was good at being in charge. But somewhere between the promotions and the parent-teacher conferences and the slow dissolve of my marriage eight years ago, I stopped being in charge of one thing: how I felt inside my own skin.
It started, of all places, in a department store dressing room in January. I was buying a new blazer for a district leadership summit. The fluorescent lighting was doing what fluorescent lighting does — making everything look worse. I caught myself in the mirror and did the thing I always do: I looked away fast. Not at anything specific. Just away. The way you pull your hand off a hot stove. I had been doing that for years and never once asked myself why.
When You Stop Looking at Yourself
I want to be honest about what fifty-seven feels like in a body you have been ignoring. It is not dramatic. There is no rock bottom. There is just a long, slow turning away. You shower with the lights dimmed. You change clothes quickly. You wear what is comfortable and appropriate and you never, ever ask yourself what you actually want to put on your body. Want does not enter the equation. Function does. Decency does. Want is for other people.
After my divorce, I threw out every piece of lingerie I owned. It had all been purchased for someone else’s eyes. The silky things from our tenth anniversary. The lace set I wore on a trip to Savannah that ended in an argument about the hotel bill. None of it was mine. It was costuming for a role I no longer played. So into the trash it went, and I replaced it with cotton underwear in neutral colors and sports bras that did the job. Practical. Invisible. Fine.
For eight years, that was fine.
Then in February, a friend — Denise, who teaches fourth grade and has absolutely no filter — told me she had started buying herself flowers every Friday. Not because she was sad. Not because she was single. Because she wanted something beautiful in her kitchen that was just for her. She said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. And something about the way she said it made me feel like I had been living in a house with no windows.
Buying Lingerie for Yourself After 50
The idea did not come all at once. It crept in over weeks. I started noticing things. A woman my age at the grocery store wearing a bright red scarf, clearly chosen with intention. A former colleague who posted a photo of herself in a swimsuit on vacation, smiling wide, arms open. Small acts of women refusing to disappear.
One Saturday afternoon in March, I drove to a boutique in Rittenhouse Square that a younger teacher had mentioned. It was small and warm and smelled like cedar. The woman behind the counter was maybe sixty-five, with reading glasses on a chain, and she did not blink when I told her I had not bought lingerie in nearly a decade. She just nodded and said, “Let’s find something that makes you feel like you.”
I almost left three times. Once when she handed me something with a low back. Once when I saw myself in the mirror under those lights — kinder lights than the department store, but still. And once when I did the math on what a single piece of silk was going to cost. But I stayed. I tried on a dark navy camisole with thin straps and a lace edge along the neckline. It was not trying to be sexy for someone else. It was just — beautiful. And when I looked in the mirror I did something I had not done in years. I looked. I kept looking. Not at what was wrong but at the whole picture. A woman in something lovely, standing in a quiet room, breathing.
I bought it. I wore it home under my coat.
What I Learned About My Body at 57
That night I poured a glass of wine and sat on my bed and just — existed in it. The camisole. My body. The quiet house. I ran my hand along my own arm and thought about how rarely I touched myself with any kind of gentleness. I mean that in every sense. I was not gentle with my body. I rushed through showers. I wore clothes that hid me. I had not explored pleasure on my own terms in longer than I cared to count.
I had a small device I had ordered months earlier — a HiMoment — after reading an article about self-care for women over fifty. It had been sitting in my nightstand drawer, still in its box, because I kept telling myself I would get to it when the time felt right. Standing there in that camisole, the house quiet, the wine warm in my chest, I thought: the time is not going to feel right. You just have to decide it is.
So I did. I opened the box. I read the instructions. I felt ridiculous and nervous and a little bit like a teenager, which at fifty-seven is both absurd and wonderful. And I will not give you every detail because this is my story and some of it stays mine. But I will tell you this: my body did not give up on me. It was different than I remembered. Slower. Quieter. I had to be patient in a way I am not used to being patient. But it was real. And afterward I lay in the dark and cried — not from sadness but from something closer to relief. Like finding out a room in your house still has electricity after you assumed it had been disconnected for good.
I thought about all the years I had treated my body like a problem to manage. The fibromyalgia flares that started in my late forties. The stiffness every morning. The way I apologized for taking up space — literally, physically, in chairs, in doorways, in bed. My body had carried me through three decades of other people’s emergencies and I had never once thanked it. I had never once given it something beautiful just because it deserved it.
Body Confidence Is a Practice, Not a Destination
It is May now. I own four more pieces from that boutique — a silk robe in charcoal, a bralette in dusty rose, two more camisoles. I do not wear them for anyone. I wear them for the feeling of intention. Of choosing something for my body that says: I see you. You are worth this.
I am not going to tell you that buying lingerie fixed everything. My knees still ache on cold mornings. I still have days where I avoid the mirror. I am still fifty-seven and single and sometimes lonely in a way that sits heavy in the chest at three in the morning. But something shifted. Not a revolution. A turning. Like a plant that finally gets moved to the window.
Last week, a student — a senior girl, seventeen, bright and fierce and already exhausted by the world — sat in my office and told me she hated her body. She said it plainly, like a fact. And I leaned forward and said, “I know. I know that feeling. And I need you to know it does not have to be permanent.” She looked at me like she did not quite believe me. But I meant it. I meant it in a way I could not have meant it six months ago.
I think body confidence after fifty — after any age — is not about arriving somewhere. It is about refusing to keep looking away. It is about buying the silk thing, lighting the candle, touching your own skin with the same tenderness you would offer a friend. It is about deciding that your body is yours. Not your ex-husband’s. Not the mirror’s. Not the fluorescent light’s. Yours first. That order matters.
I am fifty-seven. I am a school principal. I have gray at my temples and a scar on my left knee from a fall on the playground in 2014. And last Saturday I stood in front of my bedroom mirror in a navy camisole with lace at the collarbone, and I did not look away.
That was my highlight time.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: Feeling Numb in Your 40s? How I Rediscovered Myself and At 32, I Learned How to Date Myself. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
