08/26/2026
Look at her on the left. Smiling for the camera the way you learn to… reflex, not feeling. There’s a puffiness in my face I didn’t have language for yet. An emptiness behind my eyes that no one else could see, because I’d gotten so good at performing “fine” that even I almost believed it.
That woman was disappearing in real time. Not dramatically. Not all at once. She was dissolving the way sugar does in water… quietly, invisibly, until one day you look down and there’s nothing left but the shape of where she used to be.
Nobody tells you this part: that you can love your life and still dread the sound of your own alarm. That gratitude and grief can live in the same chest, the same breath, the same forced smile in a photo. That your body can be sitting at the dinner table while the rest of you is somewhere else entirely, watching yourself from a distance, wondering when you left the room.
And underneath all of it…guilt.
Loud, relentless guilt. You have everything. Why can’t you just be happy. Why can’t you just try harder. Why can’t you want the things you’re supposed to want. As if joy were a chore you kept forgetting to do. As if a woman running on empty could simply will herself full again.
This was never about weight. It was about a body that was eating less and gaining more, wanting nothing… not touch, not rest, not even her own life… and hating herself for all of it, because how dare she feel empty when she had so much to be grateful for.
Today? This isn’t a “fixed” woman or a smaller one. This is a woman who stopped treating her own wellness like one more task on a list that was already killing her, and started letting it be the thing that brings her back to her body, her breath, her life… one unremarkable Tuesday at a time.
If you’re in that first photo right now, smiling because it’s expected, empty because no one asked, guilty because you “should” be grateful… I see you. Every part of you.
You were never required to run on empty forever. 🫂
