OVER MY DEAD BODY
The subtle art of loving yourself
SHE WAS ALWAYS READY
500 Days of Summer ruined the brains of multiple generations. I’m getting caught up on the new season of Love Island USA. Here are my thoughts.
Huda is a moron
I equally understand and don’t understand the appeal of Ace
Yulissa getting the boot in the middle of the night is beyond funny
Belle-A is a crazy way to spell that name
Cierra used to work at my job
Nic seems like a chill ass dude
Jeremiah is being brainwashed, manipulated, and gaslit
Chelley is the most well-rounded person of this season, and I love her
Austin looks like Glen Powell
Amaya is a nut
Poor Charlie, Huda needs to go… for real
Jalen and Olandria are better together than Olandria and Taylor
Undecided on Pepe and Hannah
Ace and Iris may have the strongest connection
YOU’RE HERE, BUT WHAT IF YOU WEREN’T
I want winter to come and change the color of this room. It should be a blue room—icy and breathing with cold air. The kind of cold that seeps into the walls and makes everything feel a little more alive. I’ll be wrapped in a snowsuit, absurd, I know. What did you expect from me? Everything—a small devotion to beauty—becoming something you can’t help but want. In the quiet of a cold, indoor morning, you might find yourself loving me more than you meant to. I shall kiss you so much that they will mistake my mouth for yours. Yours. Yours. Yours.
I CAN’T TAKE ANOTHER NIGHT ALONE
THE PAIN AND PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
Since September, I’ve lost six inches off my waist1—nearly an inch per month. The transformation is both visible and troubling. My body has become, in many ways, unrecognizable. My belt cinches tighter and tighter. I still give a double-take when I catch my reflection in passing, as if trying to reconcile the image I see now with the person I vividly remember being.
I’ve achieved the physical changes I once dreamt of, but I often feel undeserving of this body. I don’t feel whole. I don’t feel normal. I don’t feel like myself. I feel like a stranger—both in my body and my new home. The walls echo an unfamiliar reverberation, an unfamiliar voice. Memory is a stranger. You remember not what you see, but how you felt. And I used to never feel well. I used to never feel complete.
What makes this particularly complicated is the emotions that lag behind the change. While my body may have shrunk rapidly, my mind clings to long-held self-perceptions—images and narratives forged and seared into my mind over years of living in a different vessel. Compliments feel surreal, as if directed at someone else. Even in moments of pride, there’s a sense of fraudulence. A misalignment between the person I appear to be and the person I internally know. The mind, it seems, does not shed its past as easily as the body can shed its size. I feel as if I’m being haunted by my past self. Always lingering, always present.
This has led me into new, somewhat strange, and very unusual rituals. Some nights, I drag myself out of bed to do push-ups. To do sit-ups. To squat. Not in pursuit of a new goal, but out of compulsion—to feel my muscles contract and expand, to exhaust my body in the hope that it might quiet my mind. At this point, the line between discipline and self-punishment blurs. These exertions are not motivated by growth so much as control. They offer a fleeting sense of order to battle the internal chaos because pain, at least, is predictable. In these moments, fitness becomes less about health and more about penance—a way of earning rest, earning peace, earning the right to exist in this new body, through suffering.
There is a subtle but potent difference between transformation and embodiment. One is visible; the latter is lived. Embodiment is my presence. Recognizing my reflection not just as an image but as me. Without that connection, even the most dramatic change can feel vacant. I’ve come to understand that self-acceptance isn’t found in a measurement, it’s found in the daily, often uncomfortable practice of re-inhabiting myself—of meeting this body again and again, meeting it with acceptance instead of judgment. It’s an evolving, everyday challenge of learning to live within what I’ve built, not just living beside it.
I’ve chased this version of myself for so long, hoping it would fix something. Hoping it would grant me peace. And while it has brought discipline, strength, and even admiration, it hasn’t yet brought wholeness within my spirit. Here I lie, broken, but still fully whole. Just waiting on something, someone, for fulfillment, to put me back together. I may be waiting awhile because it is I who is away. It is I who needs to return home. It is I who heals me. It is I.
This, I suspect, is a different journey—one that begins not with changing the body, but with finding a peaceful way to call it my home.
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I started this back in late March, early April. Sorry if the timeline doesn’t make sense.