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My daughter saw my birthday photos and texted "Mom, you're literally looking like an influencer." Okay I need to tell you where I was exactly one year before this photo because I want you to understand how far I’ve come from where I started. 😭 I got fired on a random Tuesday in March. Twelve years at the same company. Twelve years of early mornings and late nights and missed school plays and vacations I cut short, and every single thing you sacrifice when you have decided that your career is the thing you are building your identity around. And then one Tuesday, they called me into a room with two people I barely knew and a folder of paperwork and used the word "restructuring" four times and I sat there nodding like a completely reasonable adult while my entire sense of self quietly left the building. I cried in the parking lot for forty five minutes. A woman passing by looked at me with such genuine concern that I almost cried harder. 😂 Then I went home. And I stayed home. For a very, very long time. I am not going to exaggerate what the next few months looked like. I was 49, freshly unemployed, and completely convinced that the best version of my life was something that had already happened and that I had somehow missed it while I was busy restructuring myself into irrelevance. I looked exactly how I felt. Dull. Tired. The crepey texture on my arms and thighs that I had been ignoring for two years suddenly felt like the physical manifestation of everything I was trying not to think about. I looked worn down. I looked like someone who had stopped trying. Honestly? I had stopped trying. My friend Stef showed up at my house on a Saturday with coffee and zero patience for what she called "the situation." Stef is the kind of friend who loves you enough to tell you the truth in a way that is slightly uncomfortable but entirely necessary. She sat across from me on my own couch and said "you look exhausted from the outside in and we are fixing that first before we fix anything else." She left a bottle of something called the Besque Magic Body Oil on my counter when she left. Sent me a text from her car that said "use it tonight, trust me, stop being stubborn." HERE IS WHAT I WAS NOT PREPARED FOR. 👀 Week one, my skin felt nourished in a way I couldn't immediately explain. Like something had actually penetrated instead of just sitting on top and evaporating. Week three, the texture on my arms started visibly changing. The crepey quality that had moved in and made itself completely at home started packing its bags. My chest and décolletage which I had been unconsciously covering for two years started looking luminous and alive and I started reaching for different things in my closet without consciously deciding to. And something else started shifting too. I updated my resume in week four. Got my first consulting client in month three. And by month five, I was earning more than I had been at the job that fired me. AND working about half the hours. I am not saying that a body oil fixed my career. I am saying that taking up space in my own life again in one small way created a momentum I was not expecting. Month eight, I booked Positano for my 50th. 🎉 Not a safe birthday dinner at a local restaurant. A boat. The Amalfi Coast in golden hour light with my best friends and a cake with my actual age on it that I held up like a trophy because that is exactly what it felt like. I bought this red dress the day before in a boutique in Amalfi and did not talk myself out of it, which twelve months earlier in that parking lot crying by myself, I absolutely would have done. My daughter called me when she saw the photos. Not texted. Called. Started with "MOM" in a tone of genuine alarm that transitioned into genuine delight within about four seconds. The influencer text came right after. I look like that in those photos because I was genuinely that happy. On a boat in Positano at 50, feeling like the main character of my own life for the first time in longer than I could remember. The arms out. The décolletage in that dress. The skin that finally looked like the outside matching how I had spent eight months rebuilding the inside. If you are sitting in your own version of that parking lot right now, I just want you to know that the distance between where you are and where you could be is so much shorter than it feels. ✨ Start somewhere. Start small. Start with your skin if that's what you've got today. besque.co