When I was a young girl, I wanted to be beautiful.
Clever. Successful. Happy.
As the years slip by like whispers in the wind, I find myself reflecting on the dreams that shaped my youth - and on the stark contrast between that world and the one we inhabit today.
In an age dominated by illusion and manufactured identity, it feels worth pausing to remember what it once meant to aspire to genuine beauty, strength, and authenticity - before the line between real and fake blurred beyond recognition.
I wanted to be pretty. As wonderful as my mother. To marry a man as great as my father. To meet a boy as strong as my older brothers.
And I can’t help wondering what children are encouraged to aspire to now, in an age of confusion, gender politics, and exaggerated, artificial bodies - where self-worth is measured in filters and slogans rather than substance.
The first time I thought of myself as an emerging woman, rather than a girl, was when I saw Dr No. Ursula Andress rose from the sea, radiant and unapologetically feminine, to meet Sean Connery’s James Bond.
My heart fluttered.
I desperately wanted that bikini.
Though the film was made in 1962, I didn’t see it until years later, when I was a teenager. In those days, such things weren’t readily permitted - unlike now, when children are exposed to everything, far too soon.
As it happened, my parents took me to a large department store in Auckland, and there it was - a version of that bikini - for sale. It became my Christmas present.
No, it wasn’t identical. But it was close enough.
I put it on when I got home. Did I look like Ursula Andress? Of course not. But I felt like her - and that mattered.
Years later, there was a place in Auckland called the Ceylon Tea House. Young and old gathered there for tea, dressed well, behaved well, and spoke gently. I imagined myself a little like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: the sunglasses, the hair, the elegance. And the mischief....
My props back then were external. I was natural.
Today, people try endlessly to change who they are - false lashes, false bodies, false identities - and then insist this makes them more “real”. I find myself preferring reality.
The old-fashioned kind.
Before fake news. Fake history. Fake government.
When men were men, women were women, news told the truth, and governments served the people - not the other way around.
We have lived through a fake health crisis that shut down the world and tried to turn us into something unrecognisable. Civil liberty is fast becoming a memory. Dr No no longer hides in a bunker - he announces population control quite openly.
How I miss men looking and dressing like men!
Our James Bonds and Cary Grants are long gone. Our Ursula Andress is a distant memory.
Elegance has been replaced with vulgarity. Strength with confusion. Reality with simulation.
And yet - Ursula Andress and Audrey Hepburn were real women.
Not like today where women look like caricatures.
Getting old is a bitch. I remember mowing lawns, doing handstands, carrying my children on my fingers ... all while juggling phone calls, cooking tea, bathing kids, and singing along to Simon & Garfunkel or The Corries.
There was a time when I didn’t need makeup to feel pretty. When running was a pastime, not merely a “past time.”
When sore hips came from squash courts, not age. When bad government was an exception - not a given.
So I wonder.
When fake people with fake bodies and fake identities take centre stage, is it time for real people to reclaim the ground?
It sounds ridiculous, I know.
But what is the truth anymore?
Red is grey and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion
In the end, perhaps that’s the choice left to us. In a world drowning in fakery, authenticity isn’t nostalgia - it’s rebellion.
And maybe it’s time the real women and men - the ones who lived without props - stepped forward again.
Not to dominate. Not to shout. But to remind the world what reality once looked like - and could again.
If only we could take the masks off.
Shaydee
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