#diverse_writes

I didn’t learn my body in love. I learned it in flinches. In hands pulling fabric down. In mirrors I passed without stopping. In the way people looked at me and decided something before I spoke.

My hips arrived before I knew what they meant. They widened without asking me. Without warning. One day I was a child and the next day my body was speaking a language I hadn’t learned yet. I remember wanting to disappear inside myself, to tuck my shape away like a secret that was too loud.

My thighs touched and the world told me they shouldn’t. I learned shame in the friction. I learned how to stand differently. Walk differently. Sit carefully. I learned how to make my body smaller without actually becoming smaller. How to fold myself in public while still taking up space in private.

My breasts were never just breasts. They were commentary. Surveillance. Invitations I never sent. Warnings I didn’t know how to read. I learned early that my body would be blamed before it would be protected. That it would be discussed before it would be understood.

No one tells you how lonely it feels to live inside a body that is always being evaluated.

Too much here. Not enough there. Soft where it should be firm. Wide where it should be narrow. Visible where it should be quiet.

I started treating my body like a problem I needed to solve. If I could just discipline it enough, starve it a little, shame it quietly, maybe it would behave. Maybe it would stop drawing attention. Maybe it would stop being the reason people felt entitled to me.

The stretch marks came like whispers at first. Thin. Pale. Unassuming. And I hated them immediately. Not because they hurt — but because they proved something had changed without my permission. They felt like evidence I couldn’t erase. Proof that my body was doing something on its own.

I didn’t ask it what it needed.

I punished it for becoming.

Fatness was never just about size. It was about fear. About being seen too clearly. About being taught that softness makes you disposable. That fullness makes you careless. That taking up space means you deserve whatever happens next.

So I learned to apologize for my body without words. I shrank my joy. I shrank my hunger. I shrank my presence. I laughed quietly. I crossed my arms. I learned how to exist without asking for too much.

But my body stayed.

It stayed through the nights I cried into it. Through the days I hated it. Through the seasons I tried to outgrow it. It held grief in my hips. It stored memory in my thighs. It remembered everything I tried to forget.

Loving my body did not arrive as a revelation. It came as exhaustion. I got tired of fighting something that never left me. Tired of punishing the only home I’ve ever had. Tired of pretending I wasn’t allowed to be soft and alive at the same time.

Some days I still struggle. Some days I look in the mirror and feel old shame knock quietly at my ribs. But now, I don’t slam the door open for it. I acknowledge it. I breathe. I stay.

This body is not healed.

It is healing.

And that feels more honest.

I am learning — slowly, imperfectly — to speak to my body the way I needed someone else to. With patience. With mercy. With less demand and more listening.

I am learning that self-love does not mean I adore every inch of myself. It means I stop abandoning myself when I don’t.

This body is not beautiful because it is perfect.

It is beautiful because it endured me learning how to love it.

If memory is a blade, then I have been bleeding for years without knowing where to place my hands. And maybe that was always the point—that I kept trying to stop the bleeding instead of learning how to tend to the wound.

You left echoes in me that sound like footsteps returning, even when I know you’re walking somewhere far from here. But I am learning now that echoes are not promises— just ghosts with good timing.

For so long, I held on to the sharp fragments of us, believing that if I collected enough of them, the pain would form a pattern, a lesson, a reason that made losing you feel less like failure and more like fate.

But growth has been teaching me a quieter truth: sometimes the pieces don’t make sense because they were never meant to fit into the story I kept writing in my head.

Some stubborn, tender part of me still gathers every shard but now it’s not to rebuild “us.” It’s to understand myself. To study the places where I cut too deeply, stayed too long, loved too hard, bent too far. Not to blame myself but to learn the shape of my own softness and finally stop mistaking it for weakness.

Because the wound you left behind is no longer just a place that hurts— it’s a place I’m learning to listen to. It tells me when I gave more than I had. It tells me where I abandoned myself just to prove I was worth choosing. It tells me where loneliness tasted like loyalty, and I swallowed it whole.

But it also tells me something sacred, that I can survive myself even when someone else does not choose to stay.

The bleeding has slowed now. Not because you returned but because I did. To my own body. To my own worth. To the mirror I kept avoiding because I feared what the reflection might admit.

And this, this is the part I never expected: the wound is still open, but it’s no longer empty. It’s blooming with everything I once gave away. Patience. Kindness. Truth. Self-forgiveness. The courage to say, “I deserved more than what broke me.”

One day, maybe the fragments of us will soften enough to touch. Maybe they’ll become reminders instead of weapons. Maybe they’ll stay sharp but I’ll have learned how to hold them without cutting myself open again.

But today, this is enough: I am tending to what still hurts without hiding it, loving myself in the places that ache the loudest, and finally understanding that healing is not forgetting it is becoming whole in spite of what tried to split me.

I don’t move through seasons the way people say you’re supposed to. I don’t arrive in them whole. I drag parts of myself from one season to the next, still bleeding, still cold, still unsure what I’m allowed to keep or let go.

Everyone talks about change like it’s beautiful. Like it’s a soft montage. Like you wake up one day and the light is different and suddenly you’re healed. That’s not how it happens to me. For me, seasons come like interventions. Like something knocking too hard on a door I wasn’t ready to open or acknowledge.

Sometimes the world says it’s spring and my body is still in winter. Still bracing. Still hoarding warmth. Still exhausted from surviving something no one remembers to ask me about. People tell me to bloom. They don’t see the frost in my hands. They don’t see how tired I am of starting over. Of blooming again.

And sometimes I am summer when I shouldn’t be. Too open. Too hopeful. Loving things that are about to leave. Burning through joy like I’m afraid it might run out. I mistake intensity for safety. I mistake heat for home.

No one warns you that seasons don’t wait for permission.

I lose myself every time one changes. I grieve versions of me that belonged to a certain weather. The girl I was when the days were longer. The one who laughed more easily. The one who thought this pain would be temporary. I don’t know where they go. I just know they don’t come with me when the seasons change.

Fall hurts the most. Because it looks like beauty while everything is dying quietly. People celebrate the colors. They don’t talk about the letting go. About how everything is preparing to be bare. About how you can be surrounded by warmth and still feel abandoned.

Winter makes me honest. There’s no pretending in winter. Everything slows or breaks. I feel every absence then. Every call that doesn’t come. Every version of love that didn’t survive the cold. Rest feels like failure because I was taught survival is the only proof of worth.

Sometimes I want to stop changing. I want one season to stay long enough for me to catch my breath. Long enough to build something without wondering how soon it will be taken from me. Long enough to believe that this version of me deserves to exist.

But seasons keep moving. They always have. They always will.

So I move badly. I move while grieving. I move while still attached. I move with my hands full of things I should’ve put down already. I move even when I’m not ready because readiness is a luxury I was never taught how to have.

And maybe that’s the truth no one wants to say out loud: Change is not always growth. Sometimes it’s just survival with a new name.

If there is beauty here, it is accidental. It is found in the fact that I am still moving at all. That despite everything, the cold, the loss, the constant shedding, I am still here, carrying myself into the next season, even when my heart hasn’t caught up yet.

You tell me I am too much, and the words land the way winter lands —slow, heavy, uninvited. I carry them the way a child carries a bruise: quietly, carefully, hoping no one notices the tenderness.

Too much… as if my laughter were a storm, as if my longing were a fire, as if my body were a geography you never learned how to read.

But I ask myself, in the soft dark of my own chest, if I am too much, then what does enough look like?

Is it a smaller version of me, carved down to bone, hollowed into gentleness only to make others comfortable?

Is enough the silence my mother wore like a second skin, the shrinking my ancestors practiced beneath the weight of survival, the quiet apologies stitched into my childhood breath?

There are nights when I whisper to the mirror, “I’m not trying to be big…I’m just trying to exist.” And the mirror, tender and unmoored, does not correct me.

I think about all the times I folded myself just to fit into hands that weren’t built to hold me. All the times I dimmed my voice because someone else mistook my glow for arrogance. All the times I thought love was a place you had to arrive with smaller steps.

But the truth is haunting: I was never too much. I was simply too alive for those who had forgotten how to feel.

Sometimes my worth hums beneath my ribs like a ghost — faint, shy, almost gone. Sometimes it cries when no one is listening. Sometimes it holds my hand in the dark and reminds me that I am still here, still learning how to be gentle with myself, still discovering the cathedral in my own chest.

Maybe enough looks like breath. Maybe enough looks like standing without apology. Maybe enough is the version of me that refuses to disappear even when the world tries to erase her.

So I hold myself —the too much, the not enough, the trembling middle ground where the truth lives.

And I whisper into my own skin: You are not too much. You are a long, aching prayer finally answered. You are a story that refuses to be shortened. You are a home that refuses to shrink its walls.

There was a time I thought cleansing meant disappearance. That to be new, I had to erase who I was —scrub her down until her softness stopped embarrassing me.

I thought baptism was about being washed clean of the past, but healing has taught me —sometimes the water doesn’t rinse; it remembers.

Every ache, every tenderness, every almost —the water remembers.

And when I went under, I didn’t rise untouched. I rose with salt in my mouth, grit in my throat, grace tangled in my hair. I rose knowing: God never asked me to be clean —just honest.

They don’t tell you how painful rebirth is. How it’s not a dove descending from the sky, but a mirror that won’t stop asking who you are now.

How it’s not a choir —but the sound of your old self gasping for air, still wanting to live.

I have drowned in old habits more times than I can count. Gone under in love that didn’t know how to hold me. Sank in silence because it was easier than saying, I’m not okay.

But each time, I’ve surfaced different. Sputtering. Coughing. Alive. Still me — just less afraid of my own reflection.

Water doesn’t purify you; it reminds you that you can survive immersion. That you can go under —and come up breathing. I don’t know if that’s holiness, but it feels close.

Because now when I bathe, I pray. I anoint my body with forgiveness. I whisper to the parts that still flinch at softness: You are allowed to stay.

I treat the bathroom like a confessional, my breath like scripture, my skin like proof.

This is what they never told us —that baptism isn’t a one-time thing. It’s daily. It’s mundane. It’s holy.

Every morning I wash off what the world named me and remember who I am underneath.

I am not the dirt. I am not the wound. I am not what they touched and called unworthy. I am the returning. The rising. The reclaiming.

The first time I said, I forgive you— and meant it —I felt water move through me like language. Like something ancient had been waiting to speak.

Maybe this is what it means to be baptized again and again —to let the water name you soft when the world has called you everything but.

Now, I take my baptisms in small ways. A glass of water before prayer. A long shower after heartbreak. A tear that refuses to fall quietly. These are all holy. They count too.

I no longer ask to be made new. I ask to be made whole. To be made real. To be made ready.