The Night I Stopped Waiting for Wings

I was fifteen the first time I saw the wings.

It was 2009. My best friend and I huddled in her basement, sharing a bag of chips, eyes glued to the TV as women in glitter and lace walked like they owned the air itself. They were radiant, powerful, untouchable. One wore wings so wide they brushed the stage lights; another smiled like she held the secret to happiness itself.

After it ended, my friend sighed. “I’ll never be that.”

I didn’t say it out loud, but I thought the same thing.

For years, that show was my secret benchmark—a fantasy of confidence I believed I’d earn if I just lost five more pounds, fixed my hair, learned to walk in heels without wobbling. I saved magazine clippings, practiced my walk in front of the mirror, and tied bedsheets around my shoulders like makeshift wings.

But the wings never came.

Life got in the way. College. Heartbreak. A job that valued my mind more than my silhouette. Slowly, the show disappeared from TV, and I stopped waiting for my turn on that runway. I thought it meant I’d failed—that beauty had passed me by.

Then, last week, I saw a photo online: a new generation of women, standing not in a studio, but on a mountainside, in a city street, in a sunlit studio with paint on their hands. No wings. No feathers. Just real skin, real sweat, real joy.

And something cracked open in me.

I realized I’d been waiting for permission to feel beautiful—from a brand, from a camera, from a crowd that didn’t know my name. But the truth is, beauty isn’t given. It’s claimed.

I thought of my mother, who wore the same cotton dress to work for twenty years but lit up when she talked about her garden.

I thought of my sister, who shaved her head during chemo and said, “Finally, no bad hair days,” with a grin that outshone any spotlight.

I thought of the barista at my local coffee shop, with tattoos up her arms and a laugh that could stop traffic.

None of them ever walked a runway. But they were magnetic—not because of how they looked, but because of how they lived.

That’s the shift I’ve been waiting for—not a return of the spectacle, but a reclamation of what beauty really is.

It’s the nurse’s hands, cracked from sanitizer, holding a patient’s palm.

It’s the artist’s smudged cheek, lost in creation.

It’s the single mom dancing in her kitchen at midnight, exhausted but free.

We don’t need wings to be radiant. We just need to stop apologizing for our light.

Today, I don’t watch fashion shows for fantasy. I watch for truth—for the moment a model forgets the camera and laughs at a mistake, or when a designer’s clothes move with the body instead of against it.

Because the most beautiful thing in the world isn’t perfection.

It’s presence.

So if the show returns—if wings descend from some glittering sky—I’ll watch. But not to compare myself.

I’ll watch to celebrate the women who finally get to say:

“This is me. Take it or leave it.”

And then I’ll go home, pull on my favorite worn-out sweater, and stand in front of the mirror—not to fix what’s “wrong,” but to thank the body that’s carried me through loss, love, and everything in between.

Because I’ve got my own kind of wings now.

They’re not made of feathers.

They’re made of courage.

And they’ve been with me all along.

#Beauty #SelfWorth #Identity #Fashion #RealWomen #HopeFor2026 #Empowerment #HumanConnection #Presence #YouAreEnough

Disclaimer

Written by Kamran Ahmad from personal reflection and lived experience.