What’s a promise you made to yourself that you’ve actually kept?
Ever since I was a little self-conscious preteen, the nights felt longer than they should have. I would lie in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin, staring at the ceiling filled with glow in the dark stars, and beg the universe—quietly, desperately, almost bargaining—for one simple thing: that the teasing would stop. (that I would be good enough).That people like my cousin would finally leave me alone. The words were never spoken out loud, but they lived in the space between my ribs and the soft glow of the stars. I wanted to shrink, to disappear, to become someone no one felt the need to pick apart. Those silent pleas were the first contracts I ever tried to write with fate.
What followed felt almost inevitable. The anorexia arrived. I literally disappeared. Along with it came the exhausting performance of people-pleasing—smiling when I wanted to cry, agreeing when every cell in me screamed no, molding myself into whatever shape might earn a little peace. I learned to measure my worth in the empty spaces on my plate and the approval of others. The universe was listening and it seemed to answer in complicated ways.
Years later, the prayers changed. I no longer asked only to be left alone. I began begging for a life that did not require me to lie to the people I loved most. The lies about food, about fullness, about “I’m fine, I already ate,” had become a second skin I could no longer wear without choking. I was hurting everyone around me and it pained my people-pleasing-little heart. So I stopped. I stopped caring about anything. No matter how much I studied, starved etc. I was still not good enough. So I told the truth. I let the food in. And my body, in its own fierce and complicated way, responded. I gained twice the weight I had once fought so hard to lose. Of course there were other factors—grief, a heartbreak, not caring about anything anymore and the slow unraveling of old survival patterns—but the scale still delivered its blunt verdict. That heavier body felt, for a long time, like a sad existence I had somehow invited. Yet even in the middle of that discomfort, I still talked to the universe. Still begged.
These days my midnight conversations with the universe have narrowed to a single subject: him, and the future we are building. The old desperate bartering has softened. It seems, against every earlier fear, to have worked. The life I once begged for—one without the constant weight of deception—has arrived, soon I will be wrapped in ordinary mornings and the steady presence of a man who sees me. Still, I am learning a new practice: to stop negotiating so hard and simply go with the flow. To meet each experience without immediately trying to reshape it into something more acceptable or more controlled.
I have, somehow, regained a surprising amount of agency over my physical appearance. The mirror no longer feels like an enemy I have to outwit. I can choose how I present myself, how I move through the world in this body that has carried so much history. And while I pour myself fully into the role of housewife—cooking, tending, creating a home that feels soft and lived-in—our love story continues to puzzle almost everyone who watches it unfold. People tilt their heads. Relatives exchange glances. Strangers on the periphery of our life seem quietly bewildered by how we met , by the “plan for our future.”
Perhaps that confusion is part of the point. We are figuring it out. The path from a scared preteen whispering into the dark, through years of restriction and performance, through weight regained and truths finally spoken, even through stroke recovery was never going to look tidy from the outside. What matters is the quieter internal shift: the prayers that once begged for escape have become quiet with hope and trust. The bartering has eased into something closer to trust. And while the onlookers keep trying to solve the puzzle of us, I am learning, day by day, to stop solving everything myself—to simply live inside the story as it is, one honest meal, one ordinary morning, one unforced moment at a time. So clearly the universe and I have quite the relationship. The difference is now that I am going with the flow. Trusting that it knows my heart and will deliver what is best.
