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I zoomed in on a class reunion photo on my phone at 11:47 last Tuesday night and I started crying so hard my dog got up off the couch and came over to check on me. I want you to picture this. A 56 year old woman in flannel pajamas, sitting on a beige sectional in a duplex in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a beagle named Murphy looking up at her with his head tilted, holding a phone in both hands and looking at a picture of a woman she hasn't seen in 12 years. That woman was my best friend in high school. Her name is Linda. We were in the class of 1986 at Cathedral Prep. We did everything together from 9th grade to graduation. We were in each other's weddings. She was the godmother of my oldest, Megan. Then life happened. Linda moved to Pittsburgh with her husband Joe. Then to Charlotte. Then back to Pittsburgh. I stayed in Erie because Erie is where I'm from and where I'm dying and where everybody I love is buried. We sent Christmas cards for a while. Then we just sent likes on each other's Facebook posts. Then her husband died in 2018 and I drove down for the funeral and we hugged in a parking lot and that was the last time I saw her in person. Her son Anthony made a group text last month. Class of 1986. He'd been digging through his mom's old photo albums and decided to organize a reunion. There are 47 of us in that group text. Half of us were strangers in high school. Half of us were inseparable. All of us are 56 years old now. The text chain has been going wild for 4 weeks. People posting old yearbook photos. Telling stories. Trying to remember who dated who. Trying to remember who's still alive and who isn't. (Three of us are gone. Jimmy Marchetti, Donna Carpella, and a girl named Ruth I never really knew.) Then last Tuesday, Linda posted a photo of herself. A current one. From the Charlotte airport. She was about to fly to Erie for a niece's wedding. She was standing in front of one of those big windows by the gate. She had a coffee in one hand and her phone in the other, taking a selfie in the reflection. She had on jeans and a white blouse and a denim jacket. Her hair was the same color it had been at our wedding in 1991. Her face was clear and lit up. She was smiling like a woman who'd been waiting for her flight and was happy about it. She looked like she was 42. She looked, I am not exaggerating, 14 years younger than the last time I had seen her. I sat on my couch with the dog and I zoomed in on her face. I zoomed in on her eyes. I zoomed in on the line of her jaw. I was looking for the angle. I was looking for the filter. I was looking for the trick. There wasn't one. She just looked like that. I sat my phone down on the cushion next to me. I went into the bathroom and I turned on the light over the sink and I looked at myself in the mirror. I want to tell you what I saw because I think a lot of you reading this know exactly what I saw. I saw a woman who looked tired. Not just tired-from-a-long-day tired. Tired in a way that had been settling in for years. There were lines on the side of my mouth that I did not have at 50. There was a softness under my chin that hadn't been there at 50 either. There were dark circles under my eyes that no amount of sleep made go away. My hair, which had always been my pride, was thinner. It was the color of a paper bag. I could not remember the last time I had felt anything close to lit up the way Linda had looked in that photo. I leaned on the sink and I looked at my own face for about 4 minutes. And then I went back to the couch and I cried. I want to be careful about how I say this next part, because I am not a jealous person. I love Linda. I have loved her since 1982. I was not jealous looking at that picture. I was grieving. I was grieving the woman in the mirror. The reunion is in 11 weeks. July 26th. A Saturday. At a banquet hall on East Lake Road that used to be a wedding venue and is now just a banquet hall that nobody can think of a better name for. I had RSVPed yes weeks ago without thinking about it. I had thought, sure, I'll go, I'll see Linda, I'll see some people. It'll be fun. Sitting on that couch last Tuesday, looking at that photo, I started thinking maybe I wouldn't go. I started thinking about walking into that banquet hall and standing under those fluorescent lights next to Linda in her denim jacket, and I started thinking maybe I'd rather just send a card. Maybe I'd rather just like the photos on Facebook the next day. Maybe I'd rather just be the one who couldn't make it. I have not let myself feel that way about anything in a long time. I am a woman who shows up. I am a woman who drives to the funeral. I am a woman who sits at the bedside. I am a woman who never RSVPed no to anything because I was insecure about how I looked. And there I was. Considering it. Considering hiding. My name is Joanne, by the way. People call me Jo. I work as the office manager for a pediatric dental practice on West 26th Street. I have been there for 21 years. I have two grown daughters, Megan in Buffalo and Caitlin in Cleveland. I have lived alone in this duplex on Wallace Street for 7 years, since my divorce from a man named Frank who I do not want to talk about. I have not been single and on a dating app and going to reunions in a long time. I have been mostly invisible to myself. I have been showing up at the dental office every Monday through Thursday, paying my mortgage, walking my dog, eating dinner standing up at the kitchen counter, watching reruns of Frasier, going to bed at 9:45. That has been my life. And it has been fine. Mostly. I will not lie to you and tell you I have been miserable. I have not been. I have been a woman in her 50s living a quiet life, and there is dignity in that. But somewhere along the way, the lights had gone down inside of me. I had not noticed when it happened. I don't think any of us notice when it happens. It is not a single moment. It is a thousand mornings of hitting snooze. It is the way you stop putting on lipstick to go to the grocery store. It is the way you stop wearing the earrings. It is the way the afternoons start getting heavier than the mornings. It is the way 4 PM feels like 9 PM. It is the way you find yourself in the kitchen at 7:30 staring at the inside of the fridge with no plan and no hunger and no idea what you came in there for. The lights had gone down and I had not noticed and that picture of Linda in the airport had flipped a switch. I want to be precise about what I felt that night, because I have replayed it about 200 times in the last 6 weeks. I felt envy. Not of Linda. Of the version of myself that I knew was somewhere still in me. The version that had stood next to her at our high school graduation in a blue dress. The version that had been the maid of honor at her wedding. The version that had been a young mom in her 30s lit up at every soccer game and every birthday party and every Christmas morning. I knew that version of me was still in there. I just did not know how to get her back. I DM'd Linda that night. At 1:14 AM. The dog had gone back to sleep. I was sitting in bed with the laptop balanced on my knees because my hands had gotten too tired to hold the phone anymore. I typed: "Linda. You looked amazing in that airport photo. What is your secret. And do not say sleep and water because I sleep and I drink water and I do not look like that." I almost didn't send it. I read it back three times. It sounded desperate. It sounded pathetic. It sounded like a woman who had been sitting alone on her couch at midnight envying her best friend's selfie, which is exactly what I was. But I sent it. She replied at 7:48 the next morning. Her flight had landed at 11 the night before and she had probably read it at the gate in Erie. She wrote back like she had been thinking about how to answer it for hours. She said: "Jo. Come have coffee with me Saturday before I fly back. I want to tell you in person. It is not what you think." That was the entire message. It is not what you think. I read it 8 times. We met Saturday at a coffee shop on Peach Street called The Brewerie. It was raining. She was already there when I came in. She stood up from her booth and she hugged me and she smelled like the same perfume she had worn in 1985 and I almost cried in her arms in the entryway of the coffee shop. We sat down. We ordered. She let me cry a little. She did not rush me. Then she said, "Okay. Tell me what happened." I told her about Tuesday night. About the photo. About the bathroom mirror. About thinking maybe I would skip the reunion. About the dog coming over to check on me. About not knowing where my own self had gone. She held my hand across the table while I talked. When I was done, she did not laugh at me. She did not tell me I looked great. She did not do the thing your friends do when they want to make you feel better but they are not actually going to tell you anything real. She said, "Jo. I want to tell you what happened to me, and I want you to listen, because I am going to sound like a Facebook ad for a minute and I need you to not check out." I told her I would not check out. She told me she had spent the last 4 years feeling almost exactly the way I had described. She told me she had gained 23 pounds in 2 years and could not figure out why. She told me her energy had been gone. She told me she would sit at her desk at her job (she works for a school district doing something with payroll) and feel like she was about to fall asleep at 2 in the afternoon. She told me she had stopped going to her sister's pool because she did not want to be seen in a swimsuit. She told me she had been crying in the car on the way home from work without knowing why. She told me her doctor had told her it was menopause. Just menopause. She told me she had gone back twice and her doctor had said the same thing. Menopause. Aging. Welcome to the club. She told me she had gone on the internet at 2 AM one night last June and started reading about what was actually happening inside her body. Not the menopause story. The deeper story. The story about why her body had stopped feeling like her body. I leaned forward. She said, "Jo. There is a system in your body that handles the wear and tear from all the years of living. The stress. The processed food. The toxins. The bad sleep. It is supposed to keep up. It is supposed to clean things up. It is supposed to keep your cells running the way they ran when you were 30." She said, "But that system gets worn down. Slowly. Year after year. By all of it. And as it gets worn down, what the researchers call oxidative stress starts building up. Like rust. Inside your blood vessels. Inside your tissues. Everywhere. The rust is what wears you down. It is what makes the lights go down. It is what makes 4 PM feel like 9 PM." She said, "Doctors do not tell you about this part. Doctors deal with what the rust eventually causes. They do not deal with the rust itself. They give you a number on a chart. They prescribe you a pill for the number. They tell you to come back in 6 months. They never look at the thing that is actually happening inside your cells." I was staring at her. She said, "I started reading about a fruit, Jo. I am going to tell you this and I want you to know that I rolled my eyes the entire time I was reading it. I do not believe in supplements. I do not believe in miracle anythings. But I read it for 3 weeks before I ordered anything." I said, "What fruit." She said, "Pomegranate." I am going to tell you what Linda told me at that coffee shop on a rainy Saturday morning on Peach Street, because I think there are women reading this who need to hear it. She told me that pomegranate contains compounds called punicalagins. She said they are some of the most studied antioxidant compounds in all of nature. She said that pomegranate has one of the highest antioxidant profiles ever measured in a food. She said that ancient healers had called it "the fruit of life" thousands of years ago and that there is a reason that name had stuck. She told me that the punicalagins, when they are in your system, can help neutralize the oxidative stress that has been wearing you down. The rust. The thing that has been quietly making your body feel less and less like your body for years. She told me that when the rust eases, the body can do what it has always known how to do. The cells can run cleaner. The systems can run smoother. The energy your body has been trying to make all along can actually get to where it needs to go. She said, "Jo. It is not magic. It is not a miracle. It is not a pill that makes you 30 again. It is your own body, doing what it has always been able to do, with less interference." She told me she had started ordering a brand called Alevia 11 months ago. She told me the first month she had felt almost nothing. She told me the second month she had noticed her afternoons had come back. The 2 PM wall had moved. She told me the third month she had started waking up before her alarm for the first time in a decade. She told me the fourth month she had started going to the gym again. Not because she had to. Because she wanted to. She told me month 5 a coworker had asked her if she had done something to her face. She told me by month 8 she had lost 17 pounds and had not been trying to lose 17 pounds. They had just come off as her body started running cleaner. Her cravings had quieted. Her late night kitchen visits had stopped. Her clothes had started fitting the way they used to fit. She told me by month 10 she had been on a beach in Florida with her sister and she had worn a swimsuit and she had not thought about her arms for one second the entire day. She said, "Jo. That photo you saw of me in the airport. That is not a filter. That is not an angle. That is what I look like now. Because the rust has been clearing for almost a year and my body has been doing what it always knew how to do." I sat there in that booth with my coffee getting cold and I did not say anything for about 2 minutes. She let me sit. Finally I said, "What is the brand again." She wrote it down on a napkin. Alevia. Pomegranate. I am going to tell you the rest fast because I have already written more than I meant to. I drove home from that coffee shop. I sat at my kitchen table with my laptop open. I read everything I could find. I read about the punicalagins. I read about what the research had been showing. I read about Alevia. I read for 6 hours. I want to tell you what made me click the button at the end of those 6 hours, because I am a careful woman with my money and I do not buy things on the internet impulsively. It was the guarantee. Alevia backs every bottle with 90 days. Which means you take it for up to 90 days. If you feel something, you keep going. If you don't, you ship the bottle back and they refund every penny. That is the deal. That is the whole deal. No tricks. No subscription you cannot cancel. No fine print. You ship it back, you get your money back. That is what made me click. I was not gambling. I was testing. And the worst case scenario was a few weeks of my time and a trip to the post office. The bottle arrived 5 days later. I have been on it for 7 weeks now. I want to tell you, woman to woman, what I have noticed. Week 1. Nothing. I was prepared for this. The article had said the system takes time to settle. Week 2. Something small. I noticed I was getting up in the morning without hitting snooze 3 times. That had not been my pattern in years. Week 3. The dark circles under my eyes. They were less. Not gone. Less. I noticed it when I was putting on mascara before work and I stopped and stared at myself for a minute. Week 4. My afternoons. The same thing Linda had said. The 2 PM wall moved. I worked through 2 PM, I worked through 3 PM, and at 5 PM when I left the office I had energy to walk Murphy around the block twice instead of once. Week 5. I went to the grocery store on a Wednesday after work and I put on lipstick before I left the house. I had not put on lipstick to go to the grocery store in maybe 4 years. I did not even think about it. I just did it. I caught myself in the rearview mirror in the parking lot and I had to laugh. Week 6. My daughter Caitlin called me on a Sunday and said, "Mom, you sound different. You sound happy." I said, "I am happy." She said, "Did something happen." I said, "I am putting myself back together." Week 7. Last week. I went to a baby shower for my friend Diana's daughter. I wore the green dress that has been hanging in my closet for 3 years. I wore the earrings. I did my hair. I walked into that shower and the first person who saw me, a woman named Bonnie who I have known for 20 years, stopped in the middle of saying hello and looked at me and said, "Jo. You look like yourself again." I cried in the bathroom at the baby shower for 10 minutes. The reunion is in 4 weeks. I am going. I am wearing a navy blue dress that I have not been able to fit into since 2018. It zips up now. I tried it on Saturday morning in front of my bedroom mirror with Murphy watching from the bed and I cried again. I am going to walk into that banquet hall on East Lake Road on July 26th and I am going to hug Linda and I am going to dance to "Walking on Sunshine" with the people I have known since I was 14 years old and I am going to feel like myself doing it. That is what this has been about. The whole time. Not weight. Not skin. Not hair. Feeling like myself. If you are 50 something and you have caught yourself in a bathroom mirror lately and not recognized the woman who is looking back, if you have been wondering where the lights inside of you went, if you have been considering skipping the wedding or the reunion or the family photo because of how you look, I want you to know it might not be just aging. It might not be just menopause. It might not be just "what happens." There might be more going on underneath. There was for me. There might be for you. I am not going to make you a big pitch. The thing speaks for itself or it doesn't. What I will say is for the price of one of those big lunches you do not really need anyway, you can try a bottle. You take one capsule a day. You give it 8 weeks. If you feel something, you keep going. If you don't, you ship it back within 90 days and they refund every penny. That is the whole deal. The link is below this story. P.S. The 90 day guarantee is the part that made me click. I want to say that out loud because I think a lot of you reading this need to hear it. You are not gambling. You try it for up to 90 days, and if it is not for you, send it back for a full refund. That is the deal Alevia stands behind. P.P.S. Linda is flying back up for the reunion. We are doing each other's makeup at my duplex on the morning of. Like we did before prom in 1986. I have not told her that I have been on the Alevia for 7 weeks. She does not know yet. I am going to let her see me walk in and figure it out. P.P.P.S. I caught Murphy looking at me funny last week when I was getting ready for work. I asked him what. He just kept looking at me. I think dogs notice when the lights come back on too. The lights are coming back on. 👉 https://alevia.com/pom/5