Actor Sameera Reddy recently dropped on Instagram a picture of hers from 17 years ago, and people’s reactions to it have her amazed. “People said I look happier and more comfortable in my skin now. I looked chiselled at 28, but there is a warmth and comfort in 45,” she says.

The actor makes another revelation in the same vein of self-acceptance — that the internet actually had her age wrong: “When I was 40, it had my age as 38. But I immediately got it changed as I was proud of being 40!”

Reddy shares that when she was actively working, she faced a lot of pressure to get work done on her body. “I can’t emphasize enough on the amount of pressure that was put on me to get a boob job. So many people kept saying, ‘Sameera, sab log kar rahe hain, aap kyun nahin’. But I didn’t want something like that inside me,” she says, adding that right company helped her stay away from going under the knife.

At the same time, the actor steers clear of judging “someone who wants to have plastic surgery and botox”. “For me, what works is internally fixing myself,” she insists.

Reddy is lauded on Instagram for accepting her ageing. But when she started it, she was asked to apply “so many filters”.

“But I said, ‘I’ll show my skin when it is bad, I’ll show my cellulite and my weight’. I am more grateful for doing this rather than being that perfect 36-24-36 figure. We only put out what people wanted to hear, but it gives people anxiety when you show you ‘wake up looking like this’. No, you don’t. I wake up every day looking like crap, running behind my children. But I have the capacity to look amazing as a 45-year-old, and I own it,” she wraps up.